February 19th, 2021 | Updated on April 26th, 2023
With more people shopping online than ever before, it is crucial for ecommerce stores to create a shopping experience that is secure and allows customers to feel safe.
While it is convenient and effortless to browse the web to make purchases from the comfort of the home, there some unfortunate risks that come along with it.
It is important that consumers know who they are buying from, that you are a trustworthy site and that their purchases are secure.
Here are some steps that you can take to create a secure online shopping experience.
1. Choose A Trusted Ecommerce Platform
The foundation of a secure online shopping experience is building your ecommerce store on or moving to a trusted platform.
Services such as Shopify or WooCommerce power millions of ecommerce websites, and their main goals are to make online shopping as safe as possible. Each of these platforms also comes with plenty of tools and plugins to help you personalise your store even further.
Some of these tools include inventory management, web page designers, payment management and so much more.
With a platform like this, you can protect a vast array of business activity, but especially user data and payments, helping your website to become a trusted place to shop.
2. Update Platforms & Plugins
If you are already using a platform, consider updating any plugins or add-ons. If you have a business cloud, this can be done through cloud application modernization, which can help you to optimize your platform and allow you to become agile for future growth.
Whether you have plugins that control user comments, track Google Analytics, migrate and backup your site, manage user accounts or duplicate pages, they need to be kept up to date to prevent any hackers from spotting a vulnerability.
Outdated options may also fail to use the latest security techniques, which could leave a gap in your website security.
3. Use Secure Payment Gateways
By utilizing third party payment gateway, you will be able to take a range of payments from customers without having to store any card information after the transaction is completed.
By using a separate payment gateway, such as PayPal, can minimise the amount of places that a customers’ data is stored on the web and reduces the amount of information that you take.
Running your own payment processing also requires you to meet significant compliance requirements that can vary between businesses and customer location.
4. Adopt HTTPS
HTTPS is the new standard for websites and secure communication, and it is also one of the easiest things to adopt.
You can see if a site has HTTPS enabled by looking at the beginning of the URL or the lock icon that appears in the URL bar.
To enable HTTPS, you must obtain a Secure Socket Layer (SSL) license. It is ideal for keeping your visitors safe and making it less likely for hackers to steal data, but also improving your rankings on Google.
In order to boost your revenue and develop a loyal customer base, creating a shopping experience that is secure and accessible is a great way to start.
