Many of you who know me or regularly read this blog probably know that last December, my husband and I sold our online toy store so that we could focus entirely on our e-commerce practice. The new owners seem to be doing really well with the site, and I'm glad to not have to focus on the day-to-day business anymore - I always liked working on the website much more than running the business. But in addition to the toy store, we also had a drop-ship site for children's furniture that we had started as a second line of income for that business.

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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.

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Many Miva Merchant users are familiar with Chuck Lasker and the various ways he's been involved in the Miva community over the past several years. We caught up with him at the 2009 Miva Merchant conference to ask him ten questions about his new endeavor, MerchantTutorials.com. Find out how he got started with Miva Merchant, what MerchantTutorials.com is all about, and how you can subscribe to the service to learn how to do more things with your online store.

Because we do a lot of redesigns and offline development, our customers usually have at least two stores operational at one time - the live store and a development platform. Sometimes that makes it hard to test, though, if links from the development site link back to the live site half of the time. You don't always notice when you navigate away from the development site. Read more

The great thing about having a blog for your business is that it gives customers and search engines new content to view. It can increase sales by convincing customers of your product's benefits, or teaching them how to use it, or giving them ideas for incorporating the product into the lives. Read more