Internet users have always been wary of providing personal and financial information online, but as the web has grown, so has the number of transactions, as well as the number of sites seeking orders for products or services. Customers have grown more accustomed to providing their information to many kinds of businesses, but privacy concerns continue to grow. In the wake of the recent concerns about privacy on Facebook, I wanted to focus on the privacy of e-commerce site customers as well.

Once you've gotten a shopper to add a product or two to their cart, you have a reasonable chance of converting them into a buyer. The process of moving them from the cart or basket page through the checkout steps to the final receipt page is known as the checkout process. There are a number of usability best practices for checkout screens. We recently performed a cleanup of the checkout screens for one of our clients that followed these guidelines, and I want to present some of these ideas with screenshots from the redesign. Read on to find out what we did and the results we've seen.

Me and Big Jason Henderson

In January I was lucky enough to attend the Marketing Sherpa Email Summit in Miami for absolutely nothing. Quite literally, all I paid for was gas for the drive down, parking, and my hotel room. I was the lucky winner of a free ticket to the summit itself, the pre-workshop the day before, a VIP party, dinner in South Beach, the Gala dinner and party poolside...pretty much everything the event had to offer. And for this wonderful package I have to offer a belated but truly heartfelt thank you to Jason Henderson of Big Marketing, Erick Mott and the team at Lyris, and Todd Lebo and everyone else from Marketing Sherpa. All were tons of fun to hang out with and I learned a lot at the conference that I was able to bring back and put into action. So I wanted to share the top forty takeaways from my two-and-a-half-day jaunt down I-95 to Miami.

$1000 for Haiti - Affiliate.Com T-Shirt

Affiliate.com is running a great contest with these awesome t-shirts they gave away at Affiliate Summit recently. I wasn't lucky enough to attend (being busy with the Email Summit in Miami in January and about to head off to the Miva Merchant conference tomorrow), but Tom Wozniak at Affiliate.com was nice enough to send me one in the mail (along with anyone else who emailed and asked). And the person with the most creative blog posts wins the contest - the prize being $1000 in case, and a $1000 cash donation in that person's name to the American Red Cross Haiti Relief Fund. It's a win-win...at worst I get a great t-shirt, and at best I get cash and Haiti gets $1000 no matter what!

If you've read this blog for awhile, ever talked to me, know what I do for a living, or have anything else to do with me in any other way, you probably know that I eat, sleep, and breathe e-commerce...and that my usual platform of choice is Miva Merchant. I've used other systems on occasion, for fun and for work, to various degrees, but Miva is where I started and where I spend most of my time.