A saga’s compensation is not the inverse of the step it undoes, and deciding what it should be is a conversation with somebody outside engineering.
reserve stock → release stock clean
charge card → refund charge visible to the
customer, and
may cost a fee
book courier → cancel booking may be chargeable
send confirmation→ ??? cannot be unsent
the last one is why the ordering matters: irreversible
steps go last, and the ones that cost money to undo go
as late as they can.Ordering the steps so that the cheapest-to-compensate happen first is a design decision that the technical framing usually skips. The step with no compensation determines the point of no return, and knowing where that is turns a failure into a defined outcome rather than an incident.