Purchase Order Information Flow

Processing of purchase orders, once all the items have been assembled in the shopping cart, can be quite complex. This section examines some of the issues and methods for handling them.

Business-to-Consumer Commerce

Although there is no standard for order processing in business-to-consumer (B2C) e-commerce, most vendors of e-commerce systems have implemented a linear process composed of several steps organized as a pipeline. Order processing in Microsoft Commerce Server 2000 is a good and well-documented example. The overall pipeline is divided into two parts: the Plan Pipeline and the Purchase Pipeline, as shown in Figure 16-6.