A good friend of mine runs a company called Health Formula.  They sell health and wellness supplements.  I visited him today to compare notes and ended up gathering some great ideas.  Here are some of them:

1. Start tracking your payment errors.  Whenever someone hits the submit button at a Health Formula site, all the messages back and forth from the payment gateway are recorded and logged.  Normally, you’d expect to get a successful transaction.  However, a certain percentage result in errors.  Health Formula analyzes all the errors to try and correct them.  They’ve discovered some gateway problems and other situations where they were able to intervene and fix.  If you have control over your shopping cart, I’d recommend this approach.
2. Use Test Director to QC your website.  This is especially important if you control your own shopping cart and make changes.  This neat tool, recently purchased by HP, lets you run hundreds of orders through your system automatically.  You can test for as many scenarios that you can think of.  It’s a very cool tool.
3. Use Subversion to track your version changes.  Subversion is an awesome open source program that runs on a server and provides version control.  It integrates easily into both Windows and Linux environments and I think there is even a plug in for Macro Media.

I love talking to other professionals in our industry.  You never know what you’ll learn.