Hi All!

Is there any difference in the shared SSL security and the Geotrust SSL? I'm not sure which to get.

Shared SSL allows you to have your own domain.... but when the user clicks "secure check-out have MC's domain in the check-out URL...such as... https://www.yourdomain_monstersecureserver.com.

If you have your own security certificate, then the check-out URL will stay within your own domain throughout the entire check-out process.

If you can afford the $150 annual for the Geotrust SSL it is worth it for the security seal and also helps your site look more professional at checkout by not switching to https://www.yourdomain_monstersecureserver.com.

Agreed. Not entirely necessary if you are short on cash... but def. boosts credibility. All medium to big sites have their own SSL.

We purchased a Geotrust SSL for our first site. However, we didn't want to drop another $150 on our second store so we went with the free SSL cert.

There's nothing wrong with that thou. I've seen alot of nice sites that switch over during a checkout.

I agree, I personally prefer sites with their own SSL certs, but have seen many that use a shared location. One word of future warning though, with version 4.0 release the shared checkout location will be specificed in the cart to more detail, and the shared location will be based on a number, so instead of something like:

https://secure100.monstercommerce.com/www_mysite_com/

for checkout, it will be:

http://secure100.monstercommerce.com/104678/

While I am sure some people do not like this idea, here are our reasons:

1) At a root level, the reason for this is part of our imporved internal automation and similar systems. A lot of things that were done manually will be automated, this includes shared checkout setup.

2) This will actually solve a serious problem customers with many domain aliases have had.

In the past, if not using a redirect (which according to our SEO people may affect page ranking), then people hitting aliases or differnet options ato access a url had this problem:

Example - adamstore.com, which also has an alias of pimptasticstore.com

Initial setup would be a shared checkout for www_adamstore_com, so when someone went to http://www.adamstore.com and checked out, they would go to https://secure12.monstercommerce.com/www_adamstore_com.

BUT if they went to http://adamstore.com checkout would take them to https://secure12.monstercommerce.com/adamstore_com

which would be broken

Same with the ip address, the aliases (pimptasticstore.com and www.pimptasticstore.com), etc, etc....this was actually a bit of a flaw in the way 2.x-3.x determined shared checkout locations, etc, etc.

With 4.0 this will not be a problem at all, regardless of how the person gets to you store, the checkout for shared SSL will take you to the location as specified in the site settings, which will be using the new format as I mentioned.

Hope that info helps.