Here is another of the developments that took place while I was out of the office and couldn't blog it. E*TRADE Australia has deployed Extended Validation SSL Certificates on its site. E*TRADE joins Charles Schwab among leaders in the investing and personal finance sector to deploy EV to demonstrate their authenticated identity to their customers.

I've been away on my honeymoon, so apologies for the recent silence. A lot of truly neat things happened while I was gone, so I'll get those blogged in the days and weeks to come. Probably the best one to start with, however, is the important new performance measurement that DebtHelp has shared with the world.

You probably remember DebtHelp, the first non-CA to deploy Extended Validation certificates into production. (For the record and in case you follow these things, Overstock.com was the first non-CA to be issued EV certificates, but DebtHelp beat them to production. Overstock's EV cert issuance was second only to VeriSign.) Well, as a result of its early...

Carnegie Mellon recently released research indicating that shoppers are willing to pay more online if they believe their privacy is protected. The article studied real purchasing decisions using real money (test subjects got to keep their savings) and found that shoppers were willing to spend an extra $0.60 on a $15.00 purchase, a 4% increase in ASP. In the world of online commerce, that's an enourmous amount of additional margin for a site.

It makes sense to me that online retailers will seek to differentiate themselves based on this information. Consumers value best-in-breed privacy to the tune of a 4% price increase. That means a merchant who engages in the best practices to protect customers' confidential information should expect customers to prefer her site over others' with equivalent prices but less attention to protecting confidential information. In fact, this site should be able to maintain...

Regular readers will remember that PayPal presented a case study for adoption of Extended Validation SSL Certificates at the recent AOTA Summit. The slides from PayPal's EV case study are published on the AOTA site. These slides were presented by PayPal Senior Product Manager Karim Noorali. The slide deck is from a joint EV presentation, so you can go straight to slides 26 though 31 (pages 13 through 16 of the PDF). For your convenience, I'm including the full text of Karim's portion here: