In layman's terms, how does the E-junkie purchase process work?

Bearing in mind it doesn't literally work like this, you may find it easier to understand an explanation of our purchase process using these real-world analogies:

1. It's as if we hand out order-forms (cart instances) by the thousands every day;
    
2. Only some of those forms come back to us filled out and ready to pay (buyer going to Checkout);
    
3. We copy the data from our own order-form (cart) to another format that the buyer's chosen payment processor (e.g. PayPal) requires for checkout (every one of them is different);
    
4. Some of their checkout forms only have so much room to write anything for certain lines of info, so we copy whatever we can fit in there and leave out the rest (which they'd ignore anyway);
    
5. Then we send the buyer along with their completed checkout form off to the payment processor's cashier (checkout page), where payment is arranged with the buyer independently of us;
    
6. While it is not practical for us retain a copy of every order form we send to checkout, we don't have any need to, as the payment processor will return all the order data to us when they confirm payment;
    
7. Every day, all day long, the various payment processors confirm completed payments by returning bunches of those order-checkout forms back to us with a big, red rubber stamp on them that says PAID, which is how we know when an order has actually been placed and paid-for -- note that they don't return any of the order forms that were declined or abandoned by the buyer during checkout at all (and rarely, they may even goof up and neglect to return a PAID order form to us), so we have no way of even knowing those orders were actually placed to begin with;
    
8. For each completed payment the processor confirms, we copy all the order data, just as the payment processor returned it to us, from those PAID checkout forms into a ledger (the seller's E-junkie Transaction Log) and an invoice (Sale Notification email) that we mail to the seller, and we send the buyer a letter (thank-you email) to confirm their purchase and include any data products they purchased (codes or download links) that we can enclose in that letter.