When it came to running a retail business in the past, the biggest of your worries was someone stealing from your physical store. Today, though, with the rise of eCommerce, there are so many other threats out there, and they’re so much easier to commit. For instance, eCommerce site owners are constantly having to worry about their websites being hacked and their sensitive data being abused. Whether you sell commercial bike racks or handmade trinkets, it’s incredibly important to protect your eCommerce site from fraud and hacking. Detailed below are just some of the top tips to employ when it comes to protecting your eCommerce site from fraud and hacking.
Require Strong s
First and foremost, you can help protect a customer’s data by requiring them to create a strong . Although it’s the retailer’s responsibility to protect customer information on the back end, you can help customers help themselves by requiring a certain number of characters, as well as the use of numbers and symbols. Long and complex s are harder for criminals to crack from the front end. Quite simply, making every step of the process as complex as possible is one of the most effective ways of ensuring that criminals can’t put your site or your customers at risk.
Employ a Card/Address Verification System
Secondly, if your customers are required to confirm their addresses when it comes to making purchases with their credit/debit cards, this will reduce the number of fraudulent transactions taking place. This is otherwise known as an address verification system or AVS. Similarly, you should always require a card verification value (CVV), as this helps ensure that the card actually belongs to the person that’s using it.
Don’t Store Sensitive Data
Quite simply, there’s no reason for a website to store thousands of records on its customers. This includes card verification value codes, credit/debit card expiration dates, credit/debit card numbers, and anything else that might be classed as confidential. Instead, eCommerce sites should store the minimum amount of data, which is just enough to issue refunds and chargebacks. While keeping hold of data might be convenient for returning customers at checkout, the risk of a security breach outweighs this massively. After all, if there’s nothing available for criminals to steal, they won’t be able to rob your customers.
Use a Secure Connection for Online Checkout
A secure connection for online checkout is always PCI compliant and contains a strong secure sockets layer authentication for data and web protection. If you’re not a massively well-known eCommerce giant like Amazon, eBay, or ASOS, customers will naturally be wary of your site. This isn’t helped by the fact that web-based attacks have skyrocketed by 30% in the last year. As a result, the use of SSL certificates is vitally important for authenticating the identity of your business and encrypting the data in transit. This is because your company and customers alike will be protected from having important or financial information stolen.
Select a Secure Platform
Last but certainly not least, a secure eCommerce platform needs to be selected in the first place. What you’re looking for is a sophisticated object-orientated programming language, which is inaccessible to attackers. The most secure platforms will only be accessible from your internal network, which will remove them from all public-facing servers. Similarly, a secondary authentication that verifies the with the internal network is always handy.
As an online retailer, protecting your eCommerce site is just as important as a brick-and-mortar shop owner protecting their premises. Don’t neglect your onsite security.