You can tell that ecommerce is growing because more and more people are online shopping. Even the birds in the trees know this. Such as, $1.08 trillion worth of goods were bought online in 2013, and that number is projected to reach close to $2.5 trillion by 2018. People in the United States alone spent $10 billion shopping on their phones in the first three months of 2015. Lots of people from around the world buy things online, and every month more and more join the trend.
The First Fear
These numbers would be even higher if people didn’t worry about their safety and privacy when they are shopping online. This is the only problem for ecommerce business owners. A study from the National Telecommunications and Information Administration in the U.S. showed that about 26% of the people they talked to don’t buy things or use services online because they’re worried about their safety. For the same reason, even more people don’t do financial activities online.
It’s easy to see why people are scared of shopping online. People start to wonder who can protect their online shoppers when Acer can’t. And Acer is just the most recent example of a big company around the world losing information on millions of their users. To put it simply, people are worried about their credit card and personal information.
What to Do: The good news is that online store owners can take a number of steps to protect their businesses and their shoppers.
For starters, you should find out which of the many e-commerce platforms has the best protection features and the most reliable code. The good news is that most of the world’s best e-commerce sites are very safe by default.
It is very important that you protect the activities that happen on your ecommerce website because most data breaches happen at the point of sale. If your website has SSL certificates (maybe even EVSSL), you should make sure they are easy to see.
You should also cut down on the data you keep, especially data that is private. Keep only the most important information about your customers for a short time, until the return and charge-back period ends. Regularly delete your info and make sure no one can steal it.
Also, most experts will tell you that you should make your customers use strong passwords. This makes it much less likely that their passwords will be stolen and that someone will get into your website from the front end.
Educating your workers, if you have any, is another important thing to do. Everyone who works for you and your e-commerce business needs to learn about hacking and the wrong things they should do. Also, make sure that all of your workers know about the cybersecurity rules that you set up. This is very important if you let your workers do some work on their own computers.
It goes without saying that everyone who works on our e-commerce website needs to keep their security features up to date and pay attention to any warnings about strange behavior. In other words, you will want your hosting business to scan your site often and take security seriously. What kind of service do they offer? If not, you might want to change your provider.
What if you run an online store where you connect buyers and sellers instead of selling things yourself? You will need to make sure that everyone gets paid, even if a buyer or seller doesn’t pay or does something else dishonest. The easiest and most effective way to do this is probably with escrow software.
Today, if you want to be successful in e-commerce, you have to be willing to give your users the best security precautions you can afford. Please keep in mind that your customers need to know what kind of security you are giving them.
