“Your order has been successfully placed and will be confirmed by email shortly. If you would like to amend any aspect of your order, you can do so within 30 minutes. After 30 minutes, your order will be processed and can no longer be amended or cancelled.

Please note: When ordering several items they may arrive separately to give you the fastest service. This won’t cost you any more.

Do you want to send the same order to someone else?”

–Rob

The PayPal Payments Pro API does let us cancel the transaction and refund the customer (see here), so I *think* we’ll be able to do it. Putting it back in inventory is pretty simple based on how we have things set up.

Your second point about communication is really interesting. That will be my next post I think…

Being in the biz, my immediate instinct upon hearing something like this is to start designing it in my head.

When an order is cancelled, it needs to go back into the inventory. Then the money needs to be refunded. I don’t know of that facility in any existing shopping cart software. Come to think of it, I’m not sure that payment gateways have the facility (via API) to send money back automatically. Maybe you system should verify the card and only charge once you print the order, you will avoid fees that way. Will that introduce any additional problems? Failed payments that the customer doesn’t know about? Will people mind delayed invoices? At what stage is it impossible to cancel? Probably once the order is printed. That means you need to print/pull orders just in time, otherwise you needlessly shorten the cancellation window….

Whew! This is getting complicated. You need to add stages to the order processing workflow. You need to have your warehouse workflows cooperate. You need to have the payment gateway cooperate.. You need to keep things simple for the client.

I’m always impressed with how your processes. Having a system like this that works properly needs:
a) the programming doing the work and
b) someone to plan the process.

That’s something that’s very hard to do on a small business budget. It’s something that’s hard to do via consulting, for example. For a competitor, they might think “Adam blogged that he took 1 week to do this. 40 hours. I can get that done for $4000 (or $400 on elance) by a consultant.” They can’t. The communication between programmer & business owner isn’t simple.

I would be very surprised if your competition had your combination of low-tech & high-tech working together this well. The upshot is that they just won’t such smooth systems.

The suggestion about leaving the order on file for a couple of days isn’t a bad idea (although, the language you used would be classic). It is just another option for those type of people. I would only do it if there is a significant amount of complaints and it is trouble for yall to deal with those type of clients.