With the 21st century’s advancements in technology, it is very easy to set up an e-commerce site. The real challenge is how to keep your site safe from frauds, hacking and copycats. If an E-commerce site is hacked, this can be very serious as it could leave crucial client information, including their bank and personal information, at the mercy of the hackers. This will also result in the store receiving negative online shopping reviews on online review sites such as UK.collected.reviews. It is thus important to ensure that you put the appropriate security measures to prevent your ecommerce site from any vulnerabilities. There are multiple forms of online fraud, but they can be widely categorised into identity theft and account takeover.
Identity theft: Though E-commerce stores try to put multiple measures to ensure client data is secure. When such measures aren’t so strong, fraudsters can be able to navigate through and engage in identity theft, hacking into client databases and stealing their passwords, credit card numbers, username and other personal information.
Account takeover: E-commerce stores typically have client accounts that store user information, purchase history and financial data. By using phishing schemes, often hackers can hack into these accounts. One of the most used accounts takeover tactics includes sending emails to trick clients into revealing passwords and usernames. They can then use these login details to get into a client’s account, change the password and make unapproved purchases.
Below are some of the ways that e-commerce stores can protect themselves from copycats, fraud and hacking.
Utilize HTTP with SSL (HTTPS)
SSL in full stands for secure sockets layer, which refers to the standard security technology that establishes a link that’s encrypted between a browser and a webserver. This helps make sure that all the data transferred between the browser and the webserver is private between the two. Ecommerce transactions inevitably need SSLs, which helps make sure sensitive personal and financial information is protected during the whole purchase process. This help shopper build trust with your site.
Ensure that you have trademarked your company’s logo and name
Ecommerce sites can protect their brand and site by ensuring that they have been cleared as the only authorised persons to utilise their name as a trademark. Most entrepreneurs and owners of such sites assume that because they have registered their business as a corporation or LLC, this makes their name or brand available as a trademark. However, this isn’t the case. Instead, to make sure that only you who can use your company logo and name, you must trademark them. The trademarking process is done distinctly, and there is a patent and trademark agency responsible for this.
Always keep your site up-to-date
Unpatched extensions and applications tend to make an ecommerce site an easy target. Hackers often use WebCrawler’s that are automated to hunt for sites that have unpatched applications. You can avert such an attack is ensuring that your website and back end software are up-to-date with the most recent security patches.
Ensure that your e-commerce site is PCU DSS compliant
Online E-commerce stores will often transact online payments, and to help protect the transaction, ensure that your site is PCU DSS compliant. PCU DSS is a set of requirements meant to ensure that all companies that will transmit or store card information have an environment that is safe and secure for this information. A PCU DSS compliant site will ensure that all online payment transactions are safe.
Use a trustworthy E-commerce platform
If your e-commerce store is built on a software as a service platform, you’ll have to pay people who will help you host and build the store and ensure they address any security issues. A worthy e-commerce provider will continually monitor security issues on all the stores on their platform and put measures in place to detect any security issues.
Require shoppers to input the Card verification value (CVV)
These are three or four-digit safety codes that are printed on your credit card backside. PCI regulation prevents an e-commerce site from storing the CVV. Thus CVV is an effective security measure as fraudsters cannot have it except if they can get the physical credit card. Ensure that your site requires that shoppers input this security code to keep fraudster at bay.
In conclusion, ecommerce sites will store lots of clients’ information from purchase data to login information, and thus security is key. Above are the tips that you will need to help you protect your e-commerce site from fraud.