subject: Tips for Achieving E-commerce Security [print this page] Tips for Achieving E-commerce Security Tips for Achieving E-commerce Security
Providing customers with a secure ecommerce environment to make online purchases should be your main focus as an online store owner. Without having the ability to protect online consumers it's impossible to have a successful e-business. The only way to gain a customer's trust is to provide them with secure web browsing and guarantee protection of personal and credit card information during checkout. Unless visitors to your store know that their confidential data will be protected, they will not likely buy from you. There are many factors that go into e-commerce security, they include having secure hosting, obtaining SSL encryption and becoming PCI compliant. For the best possible level of protection, your ecommerce site should have all three.
E-commerce security starts with secure hosting. You will need an e-commerce hosting solution that has plenty of bandwidth and disk space to not only withstand large amounts of traffic, but also be able to hold all the products and information on your site. In addition you must make sure that there is a strong enough firewall to protect all of that information. The final thing you should focus on is the percentage of uptime the hosting provider can guarantee. There are a few that claim to have up to 99.9% uptime, which refers to how often sites using their hosting are able to work properly. So before you start worrying about your customers' personal information you have to first insure that all the elements of your ecommerce site is working effectively.
The next important part of having e-commerce security is having SSL encryption. SSL is short for secure sockets layer and it is necessary for providing security over networks like the internet. This encryption process provides coding and decoding of sensitive information on a secure channel to keep hackers away. Having SSL encryption enables your customers to share confidential information such as their mailing address, date of birth or credit card number and not have to worry about it being stolen. Currently all secure ecommerce sites should have a 128 bit encryption, because that level of encryption is the industry standard for processing payments. However some ecommerce solution providers are offering 256 bit SSL encryption. At the higher level, you get double the amount of protection and the code is even harder to crack.
The final and notably the most important part of having e-commerce security is PCI compliance. PCI stands for payment card industry, it's an independent body formed by the top credit card companies in order to create better online payment security. Visa, MasterCard, American Express, JCB and Discover came together in 2006 to set a new standard for processing, storing and transmitting credit card data on the web. They ask that merchants both big and small become PCI complaint so they can offer their customers the safest environment to carry out secure transactions. A number of people believe that becoming SSL certified is enough to counter fraudulent charges and credit card theft so there remains a large number of e-commerce solution providers and merchants that are still not PCI compliant. Even though you can't be regulated by federal law to become compliant, many states are beginning to enforce this standard and punishing those who are not compliant. For those unfortunate enough to be punished, they are faced with huge fines, lawsuits and their ability to accept credit cards will be revoked. So unless you want to ruin your online business, it's only wise to choose an ecommerce solution with PCI compliance.
