13 Mar
Keeping your online store secure is an important factor when shopping online.
Protecting your e-commerce business is not a simple task. Every business should put in extra effort to make their sites, information stores, and data as secure as possible. This is especially important for ecommerce brands dealing with a wealth of customer information and transaction data.
Here are simple and effective tips you can apply to protect your online business and prevent cyber theft in every way possible.
1. Secure Hosting
It doesn’t matter which plugins you use, instead your website hosting should be secure. In addition to protecting customer info, you should find a solution that’s able to consistently keep your site online as well. While it’s not as bad as a data breach, downtime also does damage to your reputation.
When choosing a hosting provider, look for the following security features:
- 24/7 Server Monitoring: The cornerstone of any effective security system is software that automatically detects and fixes potential issues.
- Secure Shell Access: This network protocol offers a secure way to access a remote server over an unsecured network.
- DDoS Protection: Distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks involve software that mimics the activity of many users visiting your store at the same time, thus overwhelming your servers and crashing your site. DDoS protection tools such as Cloudflare are able to prevent these attacks.
- Automatic Backups: In case an attack on your store does succeed, you’ll want to get it back up with as little data loss as possible. Ideally, your hosting provider will automatically back up your site on a daily basis.
It’s also worth noting that many ecommerce platforms are essentially all-in-one services that include secure hosting.
2. SSL Certificate
SSL Certificates are small data files that digitally bind a cryptographic key to an organization’s details. When installed on a web server, it activates the padlock and the https protocol and allows secure connections from a web server to a browser.
Without SSL, your site visitors and customers are at higher risk of having their data stolen. Your site security is also at risk without encryption. SSL protects websites from phishing scams, data breaches, and many other threats. Ultimately, It builds a secure environment for both visitors and site owners.
Most of the hosting providers provide a free SSL certificate. Essentially, an SSL certificate ensures that data sent between your server and the user’s browser is encrypted. And while an SSL certificate certainly does make your store more secure, the more important factor for your bottom line is that it will make visitors perceive your store as more secure.
SSL certificate is what makes the lock icon show up next to your URL in the address bar of the user’s browser. If they don’t see that icon, lots of your visitors simply aren’t going to trust you with their payment information.
3. Access Restriction & Activity Logging
This is another way that your data can be stolen is if someone gets to know your website login credentials. Online businesses that have multiple users on their account (and therefore, multiple sets of login credentials) are especially vulnerable to this threat.
Ecommerce platforms have put protections in place to help prevent this sort of malicious activity, and there are also plugins you can add to your store for even more protection.
For instance, the administrator of a Shopify account can set the following permissions for other users:
- Full permissions: Allows users access to all sections of the admin dashboard, except for sensitive account and financial information.
- Limited permissions: Allows you to block users from accessing certain sections of the admin dashboard (customer records, settings, etc.). They’ll still see these sections listed in the sidebar, but they won’t be able to click on or view them.
Another smart move would be to track the activity of all the users on your account. The Logify app is an excellent tool for this purpose, though you should note that this is a Shopify exclusive.
This app keeps track of every change made to your Shopify store, as well as when they were made and who made them.
Another example: The premium version of Magento, Magento Commerce, includes features for both setting user permissions and reviewing action logs. And if you’re using the free Magento Open Source version of Magento, you could add this functionality to your store by installing the Admin Actions Log extension.
Admin Actions Log tracks all the changes that users make to the backend of your store, and it also allows you to review the time and location of both successful and unsuccessful login attempts.
4. Spam Blocking
If your sections or blogs have a comment section, this can also be a security issue that should be addressed.
You might have seen spam comments everywhere on the internet. Random people post a message that promises something like an opportunity to earn $100 per hour working from home, along with a link that you can click to learn more. And of course, no such opportunity exists, and any visitor who clicks that link will likely find themselves exposed to a cyber attack.
Hence, To protect your customers, you’ll need a tool that can proactively stop these comments from being posted on your site. If Shopify is your ecommerce platform, then you can use the reCAPTCHA Spambuster plugin to accomplish that task.
The reCAPTCHA system developed by Google can verify whether or not a visitor is a person or a bot, and then it can prevent bots from being able to complete an action on your site.
Also, the version of reCAPTCHA used by reCAPTCHA Spambuster doesn’t require visitors to select which images include a certain object or jump through any other hoops, so you can block spam comments without frustrating your customers.
5. Fraud Prevention
You should definitely find a way to protect yourself from the fraud purchasing on your site using someone else payment information. This type of fraud pulls down your bottom line in two ways:
Once the fraud is discovered, you’ll need to issue a refund for the order, which means you just lost an item from your inventory without receiving any revenue in return. And then, your bank will likely hit you with a chargeback fee for the reversed transaction.
Or you can use Fraud prevention tools such as the NoFraud app that can save you from such expenses. NoFraud will assess the validity of each transaction on your site and give it a pass or fail grade and if a chargeback fee ends up being issued for a transaction that NoFraud approved, NoFraud will pay for it.
Conclusion
If you don’t take the time now to create the appropriate security measures, you’re going to regret in the future if you get hacked, your customer’s information gets stolen, you lose money, and your reputation is ruined because you didn’t think that it was possible for you to get hacked.
Having a secure online store is extremely important. Once you have implemented the above mentioned security measures, your customers will be protected and your online store will definitely achieve success.