<blockquote><i>What if a customer negotiates to not be charged until a certain point in the process, can workflow deal with this? </i></blockquote>
One way to do this would be to assign a different workflow for this case that doesn't trigger your "Charge customer for item" action until that point in time. Or has that step at that point in the process.
<p>Or you can model it in the workflow but do keep in mind that being able to attach one of any number of arbitrary workflows is one of the advantages of the system.
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You should read the background papers referenced by Lars's documentation on workflow, which discusses the application of Petri nets to business processes such as you describe.
<p>Workflow helps out with quite a few things, including firing off notifications. It relies a lot on PL/SQL callbacks. It's not well-integrated with permissions. There's no type/scope component to workflows themselves so there's no way to say "Tom's workflows can only be applied to Tom's ecommerce objects and objects derived therefrom" or whatever.
<p>I could go on and on with weaknesses - it is, as Lars has said more than once, an unfinished work. It explores new ground and not surprisingly some of that ground is rough and broken ...
