Some online stores precalculate tax and shipping expenses. Others ask that you
trust them to add regional tax and reasonable shipping expenses to the total
that appears on the screen. Should taxes and shipping be automatically added
to the total cost for a customer to accept prior to placing an order? If you will
be preauthorizing payments, you must calculate tax and shipping in advance.
What shipping options do you want to offer? FedEx? TNT?
What types of payments do you need to support for your customers? Credit
cards? Cybercash? Debit cards? Procurement cards? Purchase orders? Corporate
credit accounts? Private label cards?
How much authentication do you want to force upon the user? Extensive
authentication lowers your risk but decreases the ease with which customers
can conduct transactions, possibly leading to lost sales. What will be your
policy? What level of risk from potential fraud are you comfortable with? Will you
want to check card numbers against card algorithms? Do you want to authorize
cards and transaction amounts with a bank, and then reserve funds, before
issuing order numbers?
Do you want to offer for sale only items that are in your immediate inventory? Or
do you want to offer items for sale even if they are not immediately on hand?
When should customers be notified that the items they selected are either out
of stock, not available for immediate delivery, or can be back-ordered?
When do you want to notify the user of a back order? When they are checking
out? After they have placed the order? Do you want to recommend a
substitution if one is available?
When do you stop offering items for sale? When inventory count is at a minimum
or when there are none left in inventory? Is this policy consistent for all
products? Or is it different for each product?
How often should orders be sent to order entry? In real-time? Every hour? Once
a day? How do you want to handle the order you take at 4:55 p.m. with a
request for next-day delivery, while the FedEx truck is pulling out of your dock
right now? What does the customer expect? What can you deliver?
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