3 Tips To Improve Your Ecommerce Site’s Security
- Category: business, questions, web development
Running an eCommerce website comes with its toll of responsibilities. One of the most important ones is website security.
Not taking all the necessary steps to keep your eCommerce website as secure as possible can have very serious consequences on your business.
As a general rule, there are 3 main elements to eCommerce website security. You should make sure you’re on top of them:
- All sensitive pages are SSL secured (checkout pages, account pages, etc)
- *** Your store’s platform is up to date ***
- Your payment gateway is reliable
Use SSL (Secure Socket Layer)
In a nutshell, SSL ensures that the sensitive data transferred to and from your site’s pages is encrypted so that if some third party sees it they won’t be able to do anything with it. Pretty much all shopping cart systems out there supports SSL for checkout and account pages and it should be easy to get that setup.
All you need to do is purchase an SSL certificate and that’s also something that’ quite easy today as most hosting companies offer SSL certificates at all kind of prices (usually yearly).
Keep your eCommerce site up to date!
This is by far the most important aspect of eCommerce security, yet also the most commonly ignored. If you don’t invest in keeping your online store up to date, it’s only a matter of time before it gets hacked. It’s not if – it’s when.
If you’re using Magento for your shopping cart system, it’s important that you always upgrade your store to the latest stable release of your Magento edition. If you’re using another platform, either commercial or open source, make sure that platform is being regularly updated and keep your copy up to date.
Not maintaining and updating an Ecommerce website can be very serious. Your customers’ sensitive information, such as credit card information, can be vulnerable and be intercepted by hackers. And if you are not taking the necessary measures to ensure the security of your site, you WILL be found responsible for the consequences and damage that will occur to your site’s users. This is serious – if you are running an Ecommerce site, you should make sure to take adequate measures to protect the information of your site’s users. Especially sensitive information such as credit card info.
Of course properly maintaining your Ecommerce site will cost you money, time, and energy. And it’s one of these things that get easily put off because it doesn’t feel like something you really have to do right now.
For example, with each new Magento release, upgrading your installation will generally require a significant amount of work, patience, and risks. And at the end of the day, when you’re done with upgrading your store, debugging, and testing, you don’t feel like you’ve done anything productive.
Use a reliable payment gateway
That’s usually not an issue as most stores are setup to work with widely used payment and credit card processors such as one of Paypal’s business solutions, Google Checkout, or authorize.net just to cite a few.
In short…
In short, besides the cost and work required to get an eCommerce website up and the expected costs of running it, you’ll also have ongoing costs for regularly maintaining and updating it to keep it secure.
If your online business is not profitable enough to afford regular website maintenance and updates, well in that case maybe your online business isn’t successful enough to justify an eCommerce website! You’d be better off with a simple website which is much less likely to get hacked – and if it does get hacked it’s not that much of a big deal.
I hope this helps you make informed decisions regarding your eCommerce website!
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You can find out more information here (https://www.pcisecuritystandards.org/security_standards/pci_dss.shtml) and remember to choose a reputable service provider for PCI certification.
Best,
-Richard