A: Without knowing full story, Charles, I can't give you a specific course of action, but let's start at sharp end of uh-oh stick and work our way back to see if we can come with up some advice that might help.

First off, it's important that you understand that magnitude of your mistake will determine course of action you take to make amends. If your company's error was such that it caused your customer a significant amount of lost time or revenue, embarrassed them publicly, caused damage to their reputation, or otherwise negatively affected their bottom line, you may face legal repercussions that saying "I'm sorry" will not deter. If that's case you should consult an attorney immediately and prepare for worst. Whether or not worst comes is irrelevant. You must be prepared for it.

Now on to dealing with more minor offenses. As anyone who has read this column for any length of time knows, I'm cursed with daughters. I used to say I was blessed with daughters, then they learned to walk and talk. Blessed quickly became cursed. Now my oldest daughter is an inch taller than me and getting all lumpy in places I'd rather not think about. She's a sad case, really. The poor kid needs an operation. She has a cellphone growing out of her ear. But I digress…

When she was a toddler she coined phrase, "Oop-see!" Whenever she did something innocently destructive, like knock over a glass of orange juice on my new computer keyboard or shove a Pop Tart in VCR tape slot, she would look at me with her huge brown eyes and say, "Oop-see!" My wife says there is a reason God made kids cute. Oop-see moments are evidence that she is right.

Oop-see meant, "Uh oh, I didn't mean to do that. I was wrong. I'll never do that again. Forgive me? Love me? Buy me toys… Oop-see worked like a charm every time. Now, I certainly don't expect you to bat your eyes at your customer and say, "Oop-see!" but consider effect her words had on me. Instead of screaming at top of my lungs like I wanted to do (hey, have you ever tried to dig a Pop Tart out of a VCR) I immediately softened and found myself actually taking her side. "Aw, it's OK, really, we all make mistakes…"

What my daughter had figured out is that it's hard to stay mad at someone who admits a mistake, sincerely apologizes for it, and vows never to let it happen again. Little did I know this was only one of many tactics she would employ over years in her never-ending quest to wrap her daddy several times around her little finger, but that's a whole different column.

Dale Carnegie said it best: "Any fool can try to defend his or her mistakes - and most fools do - but it raises one above herd and gives one a feeling of nobility and exultation to admit one's mistakes."

Carnegie and my daughter were basically saying same thing: When you (or your company) make a mistake, no matter how large or small, best thing you can do is quickly admit error of your ways and face consequences, come what may.

Here are a few things you can do to help set things right with your customer.

A: In good old days of Internet, i.e. last year, it took a considerable amount of effort to launch an ecommerce website, especially one that offered dropship merchandise.

The to-do list for building even a small site was extensive.

You first had to find a company who would dropship merchandise for you. Believe it or not, there was not a dropshipper on every corner of Web back then.

Once you found such a company, you had to set up a formal business account with them, which often meant filling out forms, jumping through hoops, providing them with proof of a business license, a tax ID number, a pint of blood, promise of your first born, and on and on.

Then real fun began.

You had to tear apart company's print catalogs and scan in pictures of merchandise you wanted to sell on site.

You had to build website by hand with an HTML editor, and type in all product descriptions and prices, which made updating site a manual nightmare. Changing $1.95 to $2.95 could literally take half an hour.

You had to find a dependable hosting company to host site. This was harder than you might think. Finding a dependable hosting company in golden age of Internet was like finding a painless dentist in old west. They just didn't exist. You had to opt for hosting company that you hoped would cause you least amount of pain. And you were always wrong.