When you’re running an ecommerce business, security and safety are your number one priority as customers are sharing sensitive information with you when they make purchases, including personal details and payment data. If your security is breached, you’re losing out in many ways: consumer trust that could’ve taken years to build up, legal complications over lack of foresight of potential issues, both resulting in financial setbacks that can significantly hamstring your business’s progress. There are a myriad of ways to increase the security of your ecommerce website, however, and keeping things local is a great way to make sure that you’re able to provide feedback and draft design or security changes quickly and efficiently. In Australia, hiring local Melbourne ecommerce website design experts to help get things right will be a massive boon in keeping your business and customers safe, and can be a great precautionary measure that signals to your customers that you care. This article will go into detail about other measures that can help protect your site, customers, and ultimately, your reputation as a business.
Decide on a Safe Hosting Platform
Where your website is hosted lays the foundation for the rest of your e-commerce security strategy. Reliable hosts provide features that prevent issues before they arise, such as Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) protection or automated backups that save updates made to your website. Technical support can also be extremely valuable, especially to those who do not have dedicated IT departments or much firsthand experience with running an e-commerce business. 24/7 support can be critical: if you’re attacked, hackers, particularly more ‘sophisticated’ and professional scammers, likely aren’t going to do it within business hours in your timezone, so make sure you can access help from your host when you need it most.
Implement SSL Encryption
A Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificate encrypts data shared between the website and the customer. This is all the sensitive stuff you don’t want anyone getting their hands on: names, addresses, dates of birth, and payment information. This security feature is fundamental, and customers will be familiar with its presence as it is usually denoted by a padlock in the address bar of any browser. It serves to scramble data in transit in case of interception, making it near-impossible for hackers to decipher if they do manage to intercept it. It also gives you a boost in your search engine ranking, as Google prioritises secure sites.
Enforce Strong Password Requirements
If you want customers signing up for your e-commerce website, you should make sure that they’re setting passwords that aren’t going to be guessed easily. Weak passwords make taking control of an account a walk in the park, so make sure you put, at minimum, a character limit of at least eight and require a mix of letters, numbers, and symbols. Two-factor authentication is also an industry standard for many websites that require the highest level of security, such as government branches or banks.
Choose a Secure Payment Gateway
Financial data is the most sensitive of the data you’ll be handling while running your e-commerce business. Payment gateways handle this secure transmission; being responsible for data transfer between your website and the financial institution that is processing the transaction. If you’ve picked a trustworthy payment gateway provider, they can prevent transactions flagged as fraudulent. When you’re looking at providers, make sure they’re compliant with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS), which is a set of security standards that aim to protect credit card information. Tokenization is a popular safety feature that replaces the card data with a unique token identifier, which is useless if intercepted as only the payment provider can decode it. Stripe and PayPal are popular as payment gateways, but many e-commerce websites have their own partnered payment gateway providers. Make sure whichever one you choose is compliant, however: this is not a mistake that you get to make twice.
Add a Web Application Firewall
A Web Application Firewall (WAF) monitors and filters HTTP traffic between your ecommerce website and the rest of the internet. This is for attacks that are more complicated than the brute-force approach of the DDoS: SQL injections and cross-site scripting are common to exploit vulnerabilities in web applications. WAFs block traffic that is identified as malicious, so you’ve filtered anything harmful before it touches your server. Some of these firewalls use complex machine learning techniques to identify patterns of behaviour from your customers, so if anything goes awry, it’ll shut it down before it becomes an issue. Monitoring and threat detection are done in real-time, so there’s no need to wait for updates or after damage has already occurred. Shop around to find a provider that fits your needs the best, and also offers the best value.
Regular Updates and Backups
Backup, backup, backup! Make sure you’re doing weekly (or more frequent) backups and store them in a secure, offsite location — preferably more than one. You need a safety net in case of data loss, and this can happen for any number of reasons, many of them non-malicious. Also, ensure your plugins and themes are up to date so any identified vulnerabilities are patched as soon as they are found. Test your backup restorations to make sure they’re working as intended and have the data necessary to keep your business ticking.
Security isn’t a set-and-forget task, it’s maintenance. Hackers and other malicious operators are constantly working to see where you will trip up, so enlisting reliable support is the best way to ensure that you’re on top of your game and customers get the best experience possible through your e-commerce website. If you integrate the practices from this article, you’re one step ahead in protecting sensitive customer information, and enhancing trust while you do it. Security is a long term goal, and putting strategies in place now will make sure that you’re ready to meet the needs of customers for the future.