The following questions are those most likely to be asked by your customers:

• Why can't I order from your site?
• What kind of security does your site use?
• Why do I get a cookie?
• Why does it say I am being redirected to an insecure page?

Why can't I order from your site?

When customers can't order from your site, the problem is almost always that they can't make a secure connection to the server. To test whether this is the problem, have them go to

(note the s after http) and see if they get through. If someone can't get through to Microsoft either, then the problem is on their end.

There are two possible reasons people can't set up secure connections. They could have a really ancient browser, in which case they should get an upgrade.

They could be behind a corporate firewall that won't allow secure connections. In that case the solution is either to ask the network manager to fix the firewall, or to order from a computer outside the firewall.

What kind of security does your site use?

We use the Stronghold secure server, currently the second best selling secure server software, and in our opinion, technically the best product. It supports industry-standard 128-bit SSL encryption.

Why do I get a cookie?

A cookie is a piece of data that a Web server gives to a Web browser. When the same browser asks the server for another page, it includes the cookie with the request. This lets the server know when a sequence of clicks all come from the same browser.

And that is all cookies do. Using cookies doesn't give the server any personal information about the person visiting the Web site.

Yahoo! Store uses cookies to keep track of each shopper's shopping basket. When someone arrives at a store, we give them a unique cookie. When they click on an Order button, we use the cookie to decide what shopping basket to put the product into.

If you don't use cookies (or some equivalent approach like putting a tracking code in the URL for each visitor), there is simply no way to make a shopping basket work; unless the server has some way to tell that two clicks on the Order button are coming from the same browser, it has no way to know that both orders should go into the same shopping basket.

Note that Yahoo! doesn't store any information in the cookies themselves. The cookies are simply ids. Any information that shoppers enter when placing an order is kept on our servers; the id in the cookie is merely a key.

For more information on cookies, please visit the following sites:

An Article on Cookies from HotWired
A Description of Cookies from Netscape Technical Support
The Yahoo! Diectory

Why does it say I am being redirected to an insecure page?

After the consumer places the order, we send them back to whatever page they last viewed in your site (or some other page you specify). The order form is secure, and the regular site pages aren't.

Whenever you redirect from a secure to an insecure page, the browser issues a warning. And unfortunately, all the security warnings issued by the browser sound equally terrifying, whether they are really important or (as in this case) not.

If consumers worry about this message, you can safely reassure them that their credit card info was not exposed. The message is merely about the page they get sent to after ordering.