With the launch of Magento Commerce as a separate entity from eBay Enterprise, there are two new product additions under the “Magento” umbrella – Magento Point of Service (MPOS) which I blogged on previously and Magento Commerce Order Management (MCOM). This post is a very quick intro to the latter. See the magento.com website for more details.

So what is order management? Magento CE and EE include basic order management capabilities. More sophisticated order management capabilities become useful for organizations that need better control and visibility into orders and stock levels, especially when there are multiple sales channels, multiple inventory sources, and so on. For example, inventory may be located in your warehouse, in stores, and available via drop shipments. You have sales coming from your online Magento web store as well. As you increase the number of sales channels, the need for better management tools also increases.

Will MCOM make all the other order management extensions for Magento obsolete? I would always recommend evaluating different options. Order management and associated centralized inventory level tracking and allocation may be completely unnecessary for some merchants, useful for others, and a major business underpinning for others. Just is there is not one set of requirements for all merchants, there is no single one “best solution” for all merchants. I do however recommend MCOM be added to your list options to evaluate. (And yes, I am an employee! I do still recommend it however as informed decisions are better decisions.)

So why am I in Barcelona this week (again)? MCOM is developed by the Magento Barcelona team, whom I have been visiting for the week. They are a great team and have multiple Magento web store + order management solutions live in production already in Europe, with more coming. My role in the new Magento entity is to span the three product lines and continually help improve architectural and engineering alignment across the whole product range. Someone has to suffer in Barcelona! (Did I mention the office was only a few blocks from the beach?)

More information will be coming in the future. This post was primarily to raise awareness of MCOM (and MPOS), a quick response to an inquisitive tweet today. Both products are SaaS based offerings, live in production today. I will share more in the future about some really cool upcoming plans, once we have things a bit more baked.

And as a slight teaser, I will add that the upcoming Magento 2 release (RC is out today!), the additions of MCOM and MPOS to the Magento product offerings, the upcoming launch of a new way to purchase Magento extensions, and the separation of Magento as a separate company is not all that is going on! Lips sealed! Exciting (and busy!) times indeed!