E-commerce order fulfillment
Flowchart mapping the full order-to-delivery path with inventory and payment decision gates, exception handling, and a single End terminal.
For the product operations lead
Scenario
A product ops lead circulates this flowchart during an ops-review meeting to align engineering, customer support, and fulfillment on the single source of truth for what happens when a new order comes in. It surfaces the two decision gates (inventory, payment) and the three exception paths (out-of-stock notification, payment failure with released hold, successful ship with confirmation).
Annotation key
([…])— stadium / terminal; used for Start and End{…}— diamond; decision node[…]— rectangle; process step-->|label|— edge with a branch label (Yes/No)
How to read
Start at the top-left terminal. Inventory check gates the first branch — a "No" routes straight to the End after notification. A "Yes" reserves stock then hits the payment gate. Payment failure releases the reservation and goes to End; success ships and emails the customer. Every path terminates at the same End node, so nothing dangles.