So you’ve got your Value Proposition honed like a Puukko knife and your landing page is optimized for a smooth, anxiety-free glide to the checkout.

Now comes the scary part. The leap of faith that you, the “customer not present,” his bank, the card processing company, and your bank all have to take together to finish the transaction.

If you’re the proprietor of Android's Dungeon & Baseball Card Shop.com, how do you know it’s Rod Flanders buying all those Itchy and Scratchy comics and not Bart?

In the current economy, wouldn’t it be nice to feel confident you’re going to get paid?

And what about everyone else (mentioned above) who gets a taste? Of course they should be paid fairly for services rendered, but how can you avoid paying the excessive fees that eat away your net returns?

You may want to check in with our friend Scott Adams of The Direct Response Forum, a non-profit trade association that helps companies navigate the vast gray area between their checkout pages and their bank accounts. The DRF is holding its 19th forum in San Diego, Aug. 11-13, focusing on the latest ways to save money and avoid being ripped off in that gray area.

Topics will include basic training in credit card processing, chargebacks, and recurring charges. And panel discussions between merchants, card companies, and service providers will cover best practices, regulations, and security.

Let’s see: Potentially saving thousands of e-commerce dollars. San Diego in August (or whenever, really). Throw in a carnitas burrito from Taco Express, and it could be the best business trip you take all summer.

Your landing page could be a marketing expert’s dream, complete with credibility factors, bold text, and a natural eye path. But what happens when a customer proceeds to checkout and they become suddenly hesitant of their purchase because of a poorly designed page?

With this in mind, should website optimizers focus their attention on the landing page or the checkout page?

Certainly both pages deserve particular attention, but optimizing your Shopping Cart seems far less obvious. A recent article at MarketingSherpa sheds some light on this topic.

Here is a short excerpt:

While marketers toil away on their landing pages, getting more and more people to advance to subsequent pages, the average ecommerce shopping cart is abandoned nearly 60% of the time. In response to this high number, the company in this article conducted a multivariate test, that is, they tested elements on a page in different combinations and then isolated the results of each variable. They discovered a dramatic increase in conversion rates by simply adding an instructional headline, yellow information fields, and a blue button that read “Click Here to Order.”

So whichever page you optimize, you must keep in mind one fundamental yet remarkably simple rule: simple changes in page design elements can yield a significant increase on conversion.

Earlier this year, we published an article that addressed how minor changes to your website can have a major impact on your conversion rate. With a multivariate test, we discovered that even a highly-optimized page can be improved with small changes in the headline, page design, and color.