There’s another article from the Ecommerce Times that reinforces your web customer’s tendency to form a negative opinion of your company if your web site doesn’t work as it should. The article specifically talks about how a faulty order process can not only cause the user to leave your site but also question your ability to keep private customer data secure. In fact, 91% of online shoppers said they would have doubts about a company’s ability to keep customer information secure if they experienced a transaction failure on the company’s web site.

Transactions online, while technically complicated, are the most basic thing needed to conduct business. Your customers expect your web site to quickly and efficiently conduct a transaction. It’s surprising that many online retailers—and in fact some very large reatilers—either don’t have access to or don’t track their web analytics to know there’s a problem. To me, that’s turning your back to your customers.

Even while online retailers struggle to optimize and in some cases fix their checkout processes, customers are demanding more. 85% of web customers expect the online transaction to be as easy as an offline transaction. The key here is to shorten your checkout process, make it simple and make it 100% reliable, and customers will thank you with their money.

If you think AJAX is a brand of abrasive household cleaner, you’re right. It’s also a powerful web development technology that can significantly improve user interfaces. With shopping cart abandonment rates near 50% on average, wouldn’t it be nice to have a simple, one-page checkout flow to give your web customers fewer opportunities to abandon the process?

I stumbled upon a company that has created a real live one-page checkout flow using AJAX. The company is Varien, and they have produced two videos to show you how the flow works [see the video: user with existing account] [see the video: user without an existing account]. Aside from being an insightful look into how an AJAX checkout process would work, this video details the user experience of the flow. While a one-page checkout flow has improved conversion rates by 50% for TJMaxx.com and HomeGoods.com, Varien doesn’t specify actual results of this AJAX checkout flow (which you can see live at BentGear.com).

At the very least, this is a look into what the checkout process of the future may look like. If you can afford to develop a process like this and run A/B tests against your current checkout flow, it could be worth the expense and learnings.

Richmond.com named Rick Whittington Consulting one of the Top 10 web development firms in Richmond, Virginia today. The Top 10 list, published weekly to showcase the best businesses in Richmond, included us on their list.

If you’d like to see for yourself, just click here (unfortunately, to see the list, you’ll have to register to get access). Surprisingly absent from the list is Ironworks Consulting, which we certainly can’t claim to be bigger or better than considering they employ over 100 people and generate much more revenue. They clearly are #1 on my list of the best web development firms in Richmond.

With 76 web sites created to date (#2 on the top 10 list) and 4 more on the way in the near future, we’re small but clearly growing. I didn’t expect recognition this soon, and I’m humbled by it.

I stumbled on an interesting site tonight — one that is like no other site on the Internet. I don’t know how I found this site, in fact I didn’t click anything to get there, which makes it all the more ironic. The site, you ask? It’s called http://www.dontclick.it.

The site has nothing to do with improving your web business, but it’s interesting because users can navigate the site without clicking. Is this the user interface of the future? You be the judge.

I’m all about free resources, and just recently the Official Yahoo Store blog pointed out that Wiley, publishers of the popular “Dummies” book series, made available for free a chapter from Rob Snell’s Starting a Yahoo! Business for Dummies.

I read through the chapter and while the chapter is written toward people who run Yahoo ecommerce web sites, there are some good tips for those who want to improve their conversion rates on any ecommerce platform.

Here’s a link to the free PDF of the chapter titled Converting Browsers into Buyers.