Manage Shopping Cart Changes
Before modifying an order, the order must be placed on hold through an Order Hold request.
After the order is placed on hold, a customer service agent can modify the order. Shopping cart changes can include adding and removing items, addiing promotional codes, adjusting prices.
Changing Quantities
When quantities of existing items are increased, add the new quantities as a new line on the order, not by changing the quantity an existing line in the order. Managing new items on a separate line makes inventory allocation simpler.
Reduced quantities can be managed by changing the quantity on the existing line item.
Inventory
When the initial order was placed, inventory reservations were made for each items in the order. The inventory reservation secures the item's availability for the consumer order. For items that remain unchanged on the modified order, these items are already reserved, which means that it is not necessary to resubmitting the reservation for the same items. Submitting a duplicate reservation can result in double allocation and an underselling situation.
New inventory reservations should be made for any additional quantities or new items being added to the modified order. The inventory reservation identifiers should be included in the modified order when it is submitted.
If items are removed from the modified order, it is not necessary to do inventory rollbacks of those items.
Promotion and Pricing
The ordering application must manage calculating item pricing and promotion applicability. In some instances, the applicability of promotions and item pricing may have changed since the time the original order was placed. The ordering application is responsibility of reconciling the item pricing in these changed situations, for example, by choosing to apply pricing as of the date and time of the original order or using the current date and time when the modification is performed.
Adjustments due to promotional changes can also be made through use of price adjustments after fulfillment or release.
FTC Compliance
If an order modification results in a change to the expected delivery date, the ordering application must include a process to convey the changed delivery date to the consumer. To support delivery date calculations, the Inventory Details response message, when called as part of the checkout process for the modified order, includes the estimated delivery date.
The following are examples of changes that could impact estimated delivery date:
- adding items or quantities
- changing delivery addresses
- changing shipping methods
In addition to the inventory considerations above when adding new items, there are other rules to be followed to account for FTC guidelines with respect to estimated delivery date communication, simplicity for inventory reservation allocation, and future enhancement readiness.
Address Validation
If the shipping address or billing address is modified, the new address should be validated with an Address Validation request. Make any corrections suggested by the Address Validation API as needed.
Tax and Duty
The ordering application must recalculate tax and duties if the order has any changes involving the selection and price of products or the shipping address or fulfillment location. If tax is not recalculated, there will be a discrepancy between the amount collected from the consumer and the amount required to be remitted to the local jurisdictions, which the merchant will be responsible to reconcile and fund.
Note: To simplify application logic and prevent any possible discrepancy, an application can simply recalculate tax for all modified orders, without implementing logic to determine whether the calculation is necessary. Redoing the tax calculation won't cause any problems, and will add only a small amount of processing time.
Shipping
With each modification, applicable fees and shipping prices to consumers should be recalculated. The ordering application should calculates these values using the same logic as in the standard checkout flow.