Reflections of an Entrepreneur

Order approval is an important part of the order fulfillment process because it is necessary to verify the authenticity of an order, cross reference with the payment received, send the order to the appropriate warehouse (or warehouses) for processing and check for any other variables that may arise, such out of stock items, pre-order items, pending echecks and so on.

This used to be a completely manual process in the past but we refined it into a two clicks per order process over the years. The task was still pretty uninspiring and took a fair amount of time daily, most of which had to be done by moi.

This ‘exciting’ order approval job has now been passed on to Tom, our resident hardworking bot. Recent extensions and upgrades to his system gave him the ability to take on the entire order approval task at blinding speeds and pin point accuracy.

Tom will approve ALL unprocessed orders within a minute from the time that the payment instructions are received from our payment processors PayPal and WorldPay. PayPal typically talks to Tom within a few seconds but WorldPay can take up to 12 hours to process instructions. There are of course cases in which an order requires additional verifications and these are processed within 1 business day.

Thanks Tom, do enjoy your new job! I’m off to do this human activity called dinner. Customers will appreciate you as you work harder, faster and more accurately than any human can.

Ahr! Apple, you’ve just caused me a small fortune thanks to your fantastic app store. Steve, I do agree that this is the biggest launch of your career and I congratulate you for it, but you’ve made it far too easy for us poor people to spend money compulsively in just two taps!

Congrats on the new software. It has much needed improvements all around and I’m glad to say that I’m finally using my iPhone again.