There are always lots of new threads to eCommerce sites, and this makes customers think twice before shopping online. A 2009 report by a group of major credit card companies painted a picture that’s not very good when it showed that about 40,000,000 different credit cards numbers had been stolen. Because the threat of having credit card numbers stolen is so serious, it’s really important that online eCommerce sites offer secure transactions. Unless your customers think that their financial information will be safe with you, they aren’t going to risk making a purchase from your site.
Because of this simple reality, it’s really important that you take security seriously. One of the easiest ways to secure data for an eCommerce or mCommerce site is to use secure sockets layer for security. Also known as SSL, secure sockets layer is a communication protocol used to make sure that all communication between the server and the client is genuine and not tampered with. Data forgery is one of the most common ways that credit card numbers are stolen online, and SSL helps to prevent that from happening. In essence, SSL creates a special channel for information to go through back and forth to and from the server.
The easiest way to tell if your connection is using SSL is to take a look at the web address you have accessed. Websites that begin with http:// are not using SSL, while connections that start with https:// are using it. If you come to a website that uses SSL, you’ll be shown a digital certificate that provides authentication. This shows you that you can be sure your information is being properly encrypted using SSL. Your information will be useless to hackers trying to steal your credit card number because they won’t be able to decypher it.
One of the most important parts of an SSL connection is the digital certificate that the website presents to the user. This certificate is used for encryption, and it’s what keeps hackers from being able to read your credit card numbers and other information. The SSL certificate is also positioned on a secure server, and it helps to identify the website in question so that the customer knows for sure that they are dealing with the correct site. Customers will be happy that you’re using SSL to secure your online store and will be more likely to buy from you as a result.