> ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.tryoto.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # What is OTO > OTO is an ecommerce operations platform and shipping gateway. It sits between the moment something is sold and the moment it reaches the customer. OTO is an ecommerce operations platform and shipping gateway. It sits between the moment something is sold and the moment it reaches the customer. Orders arrive from wherever you sell, OTO decides how each one should be fulfilled and by whom, and then keeps everyone informed until it lands. ## The gap it closes Selling online is well served by software. So is running a warehouse. So is shipping a parcel. The gap is between them. A retailer of any size ends up with a storefront that knows about orders but nothing about stock in a shop, a warehouse system that knows about stock but nothing about which carrier is cheapest today, and a set of carrier portals that each know about their own parcels and nothing about each other. Between them sit spreadsheets, a shared inbox, and somebody who knows how it all really works. That arrangement functions, and it stops functioning at exactly the moment the business gets interesting — a second warehouse, a marketplace, a same-day promise, a returns policy that has to be honored across three channels. Every one of those adds a manual step, and the manual steps are where orders go missing. > [!TIP] > > **The expensive problem is the decision, not the data** > > Moving order data between systems is a solved problem; plenty of tools will do it. What none of them do is *decide* — which location should fulfill this order, which carrier should carry it, what to promise the customer, and what to do when the answer changes because a carrier is down or a shop sold the last one an hour ago. > > Those decisions are made hundreds of times a day. Made by a person, they are slow and inconsistent. Made by rules that see the whole picture, they are neither. ## What OTO does Four jobs, in order. Everything in the platform is in service of one of them. | # | Job | What that means | | - | - | - | | 1 | **Take the order** | Pull orders in from every storefront, marketplace and app you sell on, in real time and in one shape — and clean up the addresses and phone numbers before they cause a failed delivery. | | 2 | **Decide** | Which of your locations should fulfill it, which carrier should carry it, and what the customer should be promised. By rule, not by hand. | | 3 | **Move it** | Pick, pack and dispatch it in the warehouse or the shop; book the carrier or send your own driver; take it back if it comes back. | | 4 | **Tell everyone** | Keep the customer, the sales channel and your own systems current, without anyone asking. | > [!NOTE] > > **One order record, start to finish** > > The idea underneath all of it is that an order is a single record from checkout to doorstep — not a row in a storefront, then a line in a spreadsheet, then a parcel in a carrier portal, with a person reconciling the three. > > That is what makes the rest possible. Routing can weigh distance against stock because it can see both. A tracking page can show one status across four carriers because the statuses are normalized onto one record. A return can be matched to its original order because it never stopped being the same order. ## The platform 9 modules, 211 documented features. They divide roughly into four jobs above. ### Getting orders in | | | | - | - | | [Sales Channels](https://docs.tryoto.com/modules/sales-channels/overview.md) | More than 40 prebuilt integrations — Shopify, Salla, Zid, WooCommerce, Adobe Commerce, Noon, Trendyol, Jahez and the rest — plus an API for anything with no connector. Orders in, stock and statuses out. | | [Omnichannel OMS](https://docs.tryoto.com/modules/omnichannel-oms/overview.md) | The order's home. Sync, routing, address correction, pre-fulfillment checks and fulfillment. The largest module, and the one the others hang off. | ### Deciding and shipping | | | | - | - | | [Hubs Management](https://docs.tryoto.com/modules/hubs-management/overview.md) | Warehouses, shops and third-party sites configured as one kind of thing, so anywhere you hold stock can ship. This is what makes ship-from-store possible. | | [Shipping Management](https://docs.tryoto.com/modules/shipping-management/overview.md) | **460+** carrier integrations worldwide (**15+** on OTO rates), rules that choose between them, labels and manifests, and reconciliation of what each carrier actually invoiced you. | | [OTO FLEX](https://docs.tryoto.com/modules/oto-flex/overview.md) | Your own drivers, when you have them — assignment, route planning, pickup and proof of delivery, governed by the same rules as the carriers. | ### The physical operation | | | | - | - | | [Warehouse Management](https://docs.tryoto.com/modules/warehouse-management/overview.md) | OTO PACK: bins, zones, waves, picking on a handheld, packing, dispatch and receiving. | | [Inventory Management](https://docs.tryoto.com/modules/inventory-management/overview.md) | What you hold, where it sits, and keeping that in step with every channel that publishes it. | | [Return Management](https://docs.tryoto.com/modules/return-management/overview.md) | A customer-facing return portal, structured receiving with discrepancy handling, and rules for what may be returned at all. | ### Telling people | | | | - | - | | [Customer Notification](https://docs.tryoto.com/modules/customer-notification/overview.md) | SMS, email and WhatsApp on your own sender identity, plus branded tracking and returns pages on your own domain. | Alongside those sit Analytics & Reporting and Billing, Payments & COD, and the [API](https://docs.tryoto.com/developers/overview.md) — through which everything above is also available programmatically. ## Who runs it | Role | What OTO is, to them | | - | - | | **Operations manager** | One queue instead of six tabs. The place where an exception surfaces before a customer finds it. | | **Warehouse team** | A handheld app that says which bin, which item, how many — and a packing bench that catches the wrong item before it ships. | | **E-commerce manager** | A new channel is a configuration step rather than a project, and the delivery promise on the checkout is one the business can keep. | | **Customer service** | The answer to “where is my order” on one screen, and usually the customer answering it themselves on a tracking page. | | **Finance** | What each shipment cost, what the carrier invoiced, and where those two disagree. | | **Developers** | A REST API covering the whole surface, and webhooks so the integration is pushed rather than polled. | ## What OTO is not Worth being plain about, because it shapes what the platform is good at. | | | | - | - | | **Not a carrier** | OTO is software. It does not carry parcels. It connects you to the companies that do — and, through [OTO FLEX](https://docs.tryoto.com/modules/oto-flex/overview.md), helps you run your own drivers — but no van in the picture belongs to OTO. | | **Not a storefront** | It does not sell anything or host a shop. It connects to the platform where you already do. | | **Not an ERP** | It does not run your accounting or your procurement. It maps onto the ERP you have, by hub code and SKU. | > [!TIP] > > **Not being the carrier is the point** > > A platform that owned a fleet would have a reason to prefer that fleet. OTO does not, which is why routing can weigh every carrier you have a contract with purely on cost, coverage and performance — and why adding a carrier, or dropping one, is a settings change rather than a migration. ## Built for how this region actually ships OTO serves commerce in Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Türkiye, and several things follow from that which a platform built elsewhere tends to get wrong. | | | | - | - | | **Addresses** | Saudi national addressing — short address codes, secondary numbers, districts — is handled natively, not bolted onto a format designed for street numbers and postcodes. | | **Cash on delivery** | COD is a first-class payment method throughout, not an afterthought: collection, per-carrier ceilings, fees, remittance, and the refund path a cash order needs when it comes back. | | **The platforms merchants use** | Salla, Zid, Makane, Matjrah, Shahbandr, Trendyol, Noon, Jahez and Foodics sit beside Shopify and Adobe Commerce in the same catalog. | | **Working weeks and hours** | Hub schedules default to the regional working week, and delivery promises are calculated against the hours a site actually keeps. | | **Arabic** | Customer-facing pages and messages are authored per language, so the customer reads their own. | ## Where to go next > **[Core concepts](https://docs.tryoto.com/get-started/core-concepts.md)** > > Orders, shipments, hubs, brands, routes and waves — the vocabulary the rest of the docs use. > **[Quick start](https://docs.tryoto.com/get-started/quickstart.md)** > > First order to first delivery. > **[Omnichannel OMS](https://docs.tryoto.com/modules/omnichannel-oms/overview.md)** > > The module most people should read first. > **[Developers](https://docs.tryoto.com/developers/overview.md)** > > The same platform, as an API. ## Related topics - [SMS, email and WhatsApp providers](https://docs.tryoto.com/integrations/messaging-providers.md) - [Shipping Invoices Reconciliation](https://docs.tryoto.com/modules/shipping-management/shipping-invoices-reconciliation.md) - [ERP integrations](https://docs.tryoto.com/integrations/erp-systems.md) This documentation is built and hosted on [Mintlify](https://mintlify.com), a developer documentation platform.