Find an Undervalued Asset. Fix It Up. Flip It. (Now It’s Web Sites, Not Houses)

The New York Times has an interesting article on buying fixer-upper web sites, including online stores.

The Efficacy of “Click Here”

The Efficacy of “Click Here”, Site Redesigns, Getting Physical and Whatever Happened to Urchin? 

Click here for an interesting post on the power of using “click here”.

Inc.com has a good analysis of two sites that were modified to improve conversion rates. And here’s an account of a popular online store that has gone brick-and-mortar.

Arstechnica looks at what happened to Urchin after it was bought out by Google.

Rule Breakers in the credit card processing industry

“The credit card processing industry is notorious for extreme complexity, hidden fees, unsavory providers, and generally considered by many to be one of the most painful parts of running a business, and rightfully so. Buying credit card processing is like getting your car repaired in that consumers usually do not know enough about what they’re buying to ensure that they’re being treated fairly.” [More]

Top Ten Mistakes of Shopping Cart Design Revisited

The Software Usability Research Laboratory at Wichita State has an interesting article in their Usability News journal entitled:  Top Ten Mistakes of Shopping Cart Design Revisited:  A Survey of 500 Top E-Commerce Websites

It’s a follow up to their earlier report on the same subject. There’s a link to that within the article. Definitely worth reading.

Dreamhosts, Passwords and Security

Dreamhost, who do/did host a number of Miva Merchant stores, recently announced that some 3500 FTP passwords were leaked. Ouch!

And speaking of passwords, we get to see a lot of, er, interesting ones. Although many banks and other sites have instituted frustrating login systems, forcing you to change your password frequently, use a mix of numbers, letters and mixed case, remember a bunch of security questions and the like, there is a good middle ground for your own site and store passwords. Don’t use any of the most obvious passwords, your sitename for both the login and password, and, if you’re generating a password for temporary use, don’t use “temp” “support” or, one of the best that I’ve seen–login: “help”, password: “me”. Personally, I don’t like the auto-generated OpenUI passwords either, as they have the same format, only changing a few digits. And, of course, regardless of the quality of your password, you shouldn’t be storing credit card numbers on the server. A defaced site can be fixed, losing your customers’ card numbers cannot.

Online Insecurity & Trickery

Three stories regarding online security today:

1. Jen from Hostasaurus describes an incident where her gmail account was improperly accessed for use with Google checkout
2. BoingBoing gives an account of Astroglide exposing their customers, er, preferences by putting confidential information in web accessible directories. The wonderfully named Homeland Stupidity has more details. Needless to say, it’s never a good idea to store data in a public area.
3. BoingBoing also covers an issue where online buyers are slipping orders past unwary online stores using some address trickery. You might want to make your shipping department aware of this one.