Orders arrive from everywhere and get fulfilled in one place

A business that sells through three channels usually fulfils through three queues. Web orders in one screen, marketplace orders in another, phone orders on a printed sheet. Three sets of picking, three ways to mark something shipped, and three answers when a customer asks where their order is.

The reason is historical rather than sensible. Each channel arrived with its own software and each brought a fulfilment workflow along with it.

Channel-neutral, on purpose

Rutba Orders is channel-neutral by design. A storefront checkout, a marketplace sale and an order typed by somebody on the phone all create the same order, tracked through the same pipeline. The channel is a field on the order, not a different kind of order. A sale at the counter is the exception, and on purpose: the customer leaves with the goods, so it settles at the till, against the same stock, and there is nothing left to fulfil.

That sounds like an implementation detail. It is the reason one picking workflow covers all three, one returns process puts stock back correctly regardless of origin, and a customer asking about their order gets the same answer from whoever picks up.

The last mile, when it is yours

Plenty of businesses run their own delivery. That is a different problem from shipping by carrier, and it is the one most order systems hand off to a separate app.

• Orders, the hub: picking, packing, dispatch, invoicing and returns.
• Rider, the driver’s app: assigned runs, navigation, proof of delivery, and cash collected.
• Dispatch, the transport controller’s board: consignments and trips, proof of delivery and the cash that comes back, carriers with rate cards, and a queue of exceptions.
• Track, the page your customer opens from a message: one consignment, no account, on a phone.

Cash on delivery is a reconciliation problem

It is worth dwelling on the least glamorous feature here, because it is the one that costs businesses real money. A driver takes cash at the door. That cash has to reconcile against the order, against the run, and against the drawer at the end of the day.

Where the driver app and the order system are different software, that reconciliation is a spreadsheet and an argument. Where the proof of delivery, the amount collected and the order are one record, it is a report.

And returns put the stock back

A return that refunds the customer but does not restore the stock is the single most common way a stock figure goes wrong, and it is almost always a symptom of the refund living in accounting and the stock living somewhere else. Orders reserves through Rutba Inventory, which it requires, so a return moves both.

Play the film

Added 30 October 2026: Rutba Orders on film, with an invented business.