So your customers have shopping carts full of your widgets. Congratulations! But don't start counting your chickens: You still have some work to do before you make those sales. You can't send customers their products until you calculate the bottom lines. And more importantly, you still need to determine whether they have the funds to pay for their purchases. So before you accept those orders, you'll need to calculate tax, determine shipping costs, and securely process the customers' preferred methods of payment.

    The good news is that a number of software companies have been hard at work over the past few years, making this part of the process as painless as possible. The bad news is that it may not be as plug-and-play as you had hoped.

    The key is to figure out which solutions work well with your company and your customers and are also compatible with whatever e-commerce package or common application programming language you'll be choosing in Lesson 4. Since you may have to make some compromises with either the e-commerce package or the plug-in software solutions, your best bet is to examine all the options outlined in this lesson and Lesson 4 before unwrapping the cellophane on any software.

    Let's get started with a look at the dreaded taxes.