Apparatus and methods for providing a fine granularity alerting mechanism for alerting customers of the status of an order are provided. With the apparatus and methods, a customer selects a supplier of a good or service and places an order with the supplier. Upon submitting the order to the supplier, a session between the supplier and the customer is initiated such that the customer may be provided with one or more alerts of the current status of the customer's order. The one or more alerts may be periodic or may be based on the occurrence of one or more certain events. The alerts may include an estimated time of travel from a customer's current location to a location at which the order is to be completed along with an estimated time of completion of the order. In one embodiment, if the estimated time of travel from the customer's current location to the completion location is the same or within a certain tolerance of the estimated time of completion of the order, an alert is transmitted to the customer indicating that the customer should begin traveling to the completion location. In another embodiment, the alerts may include an estimated cost of the order based on a base cost for the product or service ordered as well as incremental costs for delay on the part of the customer for completion of the order.