Time spend on managing payments

[AffiliateDreamer]

Hi,

How long *should* it take to manage 50 orders? (credit card management only, not filling the order).

Obviously it varies per industry as some are more prone to fraud etc., but being a 1-man operation in the beginning scares me hehe.

Is it a daily headache ensuring the $ comes through properly?

[vincevincevince]

This really depends upon your ecommerce setup and your payment processor. You can, in most cases, automatically process orders with no user intervention. However, automatic processing is not advised as things which are obviously fraudulent to you will not always be picked up automatically. In addition there may be abusive orders (taking advantage of a massively mis-priced item, ordering thousands of free samples, etc.) which you need to be able to catch early on.

One thing which can really help is a browser toolbar or a system-tray application which alerts you to new orders, and with one click shows you the order details to approve (charge) or decline (cancel).

I guess the maxim that you don't need to worry about the increasing cost of processing increasing orders is also true; if orders double so does profit and you should be able to take someone on to help out.