First, on any order page where you are asked to enter your credit card or check information never, and I mean never, provide any personal financial information unless you see that little locked padlock symbol in the lower left or right part of your computer screen. Double click on that padlock when you see it and read what pops up. All of it. Make sure the information looks right to you. If any of the dates are expired, or soon-to-be, don’t order. Anything.

Second, ensure that the order page that contains the form for you to input your personal information into has a Uniform Resource Locator (URL) with an ‘s’ in it. I know, I know - too much techie-speak. I’ll explain with two examples…

A non-secure website page has an URL that looks like this: http://www.mauigateway.com/seal/

A secure website page has an URL that looks like this: https://www.mauigateway.com/seal/

Notice the ‘s’ right after the ‘http’ letters in the second example? This makes all the difference because that ‘s’ is more than just an extra letter: it stands for ‘secure’. So, if the URL of the webpage you want to order from doesn’t have that extra ‘s’ in it, it’s not a truly secure website and you’d be wise to not order anything from it. Period.

Oh, and don’t believe anyone who tells you that all one needs to do to make a non-secure website’s order page secure is to type in an ‘s’ after the ‘http’ letters in the URL. Trust me, there is a lot more that goes into making a webpage secure than just hitting one key on a keyboard.

If you would like to get a primer on just how much more, so you can feel safer about your online ordering of those cars and horses, I highly suggest you click on the website URL in the second example above. It’s a very educational page on what makes a site genuinely authentic.

Now lets move on to the last piece to this sometimes-confusing online ordering puzzle. And that piece is a tiny piece of software: the ‘Alexa’ toolbar.

Alexa (that was bought out by Amazon.com) is a small, free program available at the Alexa.com website. It’s been downloaded over ten million times and only represents a small portion of Internet users, but that’s enough to help us out here.

Essentially, Alexa ranks a website’s popularity (e.g. Yahoo.com: #1, MSN.com: #2, Google.com: #3, Amazon.com: #18, Dell.com: #127, Verizon.com: #439, etc.) based on how frequently that site is visited by Alexa toolbar users.

Once installed on a computer Alexa tracks and ranks every website visited from that computer in relation to all the other 16,000,000+ websites on the World Wide Web. This ranking is easily visible in the toolbar itself and it changes as each page is visited. (Let me add that Alexa ranks all the web visits from a computer and it gathers cyber-crumbs wherever one goes, but the program cannot penetrate secure webpages (like order pages) so a toolbar user won’t be unknowingly giving away any financial/bank/credit card secrets. Also, the toolbar can be turned on or off in your browser at any time just by clicking on View>Toolbars>Alexa.)

So, how does this help you with your online ordering stuff? Good question. Let’s answer it.

Suppose you want to order something from a website that tells you it’s super-dee-duper e-popular and that it gets several million hits a week making it one of the ‘top sites on the Net’.

Also, that it’s won all these Top Site e-awards and it shows you all the twirling graphics and dancing enchiladas to prove this, and to cinch all this it provides a bunch of rave testimonials from past ‘satisfied buyers’. Sounds pretty convincing - so just place the order, right? Well, hold on little doggie. FIRST check out your Alexa toolbar.

Take a close look at that ranking in your trusty Alexa toolbar and what do you see? This site is ranked as the 2,615,573rd most popular site in the world. Hey, wait a minute! Something doesn’t mesh does it? Either they’re lying and trying to mislead visitors/buyers about their popularity (perhaps just to get their money?) or this site is EXTREMELY unpopular with those other ten million Alexa users, for some reason. Either way – not good.

So what should you do? How about you think twice about ordering from this site or wait at least until after you contact them (assuming they have a phone number listed) and perhaps see if they accept easily cancelable checks. And if they don’t then don’t buy. Simple.

So there you have it. With Alexa you can now know for yourself, versus just believing what you read or are told, if what you see is what you’re going to get.

And add this piece to the locking padlock and the secure order page pieces and you can be almost certain that your online ordering will piece together as perfectly as expected. And that you actually get what you paid for. Cool.

Written by Andre Best
President, Ultimate Results, Inc.
http://www.andrebest.com - Learn About Life From Another Perspective

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