I’m willing to bet that if you asked 10 random people on the street what the optimal number of pages for the checkout process of an e-commerce website is, you’d get the following result:

7 would ignore you completely.

1 would raise an eyebrow at you and give you that “You talkin’ to me?” look. 

1 would ask you to repeat the question, then tell you they don’t know what an e-commerce website is

1 would say “1″

If the first seven hadn’t ignored you, they’d have probably replied with a “1″ or a “2″.  Most people don’t like to waste their timenavigating through endless confirmation pages to finally get to a receipt for the item they’re buying.  Or, do they?

Elastipath recently released a report of the e-commerce tactics of the top 100 online retailers.  Although the data are affected by other factors, the report shows that vendors using 3 pages in the checkout process have a higher conversion rate, converting an average of 6.3% of their visitors into sales.  Four, five and seven checkout pages all convert at an average of 5.6%-5.7%.  The much heralded one checkout page converts at an average of only 2.5%.

What can explain this counterintuitive result?  One argument is that even though they don’t like to admit it, people feel more comfortable with the long checkout process.  One checkout page just seems like someone is trying to scam them out of their money.  Multiple checkout pages give customers a chance to reassure themselves that the busieness is reputable, everything will ship to the right address and the proper card will be charged.

Whatever the reason, this is good news for your online store.  You can safely use multiple checkout pages without the fear of losing your customers.

Some guy we met at some bar in Atlanta mentioned some website - you know how that goes. It’s called http://threadless.com/. You can upload t-shirt designs, buy yours and others’ t-shirt designs, vote on t-shirt designs… etc. And they have kids T’s and sweatshirts too.

That site led me to the site of designer Travis Pitts. He is a seven-time-awarded designer at threadless and is also making a mosaic of Bettie Page out of dice. I’ve never seen art from dice before but I am quite jealous. It reminds of my dot matrics printer of yesteryear.

At HOW I was telling others about MOPHIE Illuminator Process. This teen entrepreneur takes ideas people have for ipod accessories and has them manufactured - makes them come to life. Great shopping for people who take their ipod everywhere and are looking for innovative ways to get an all-in-one for their phone/wallet/keys/headphones/ipod… which probably led to the creation of the iphone, due in stores in a few days.

One speaker told everyone to get on facebook.com and linkedin.com. I am already a Linkedin member, and don’t see the advantage to joining both, so I didn’t.

I also wanted to see Chip Kidd’s final Superman comic book cover, since we saw early stages of it. A little research found the effeminate strong man relaxing on a cloud.

One site I learned about is being worked on right now, but if you need more Flash-plus-video tutorials, check out http://gotoandlearn.com/download.php.

Last but not least, if you need some tunes, remember the Clermont while chillin’ with Herbie Hancock’s Watermelon Man.