E-Commerce practice provides business owners with a wide range of fresh opportunities that make shopping experience interactive and attract plenty of customers daily. However, alongside with this one-of-a-kind digital engagement experience, e-Commerce business owners inevitably face with a new threat – hacker attacks, identity thefts, and data loss. The absence of diligent management and the required steps to secure your website can cause a complete failure and bring irreversible damage to your business profitability and a spotless reputation.
How to protect your webstore from cyber attacks and frauds?
- Commit your business to a trustworthy e-Commerce platform. Do you still believe that being hacked is something that can only happen in a Hollywood movie? Let’s remember how eBay survived a huge cyber attack. Back in 2014, the e-Commerce giant lost sensitive data of no less than 233 million people around the world, and 15 million UK citizens in particular. The lost customer profile database contained phone numbers, e-mails and even credentials. The same situation can happen to every webstore, regardless of its size and business area.
That’s why the question of choosing a reliable e-Commerce partner comes first. Google will show you countless Best e-Commerce ratings, but almost all of them include the universally acknowledged e-Commerce providers, such as: Shopify, Magento, WordPress and Selz. These platforms may even allow additional security solutions that can effectively manage admin user permissions, back up your data to a separate server and protect your website dashboard from fraudulent login attempts.
- Verify that you’re PCI compliant. Twice. According to the PCI standard there are 12 specific requirements developed to secure your customer payments. To be honest, PCI compliance process is not so easy to comprehend, but even if you’re a very small online retailer, you have no other choice. A lot of companies opt for PCI secure coding training for their development team and you probably should too.
However, it will be much easier if you decide to load this responsibility to someone else’s shoulders. You just need to select a suitable PSP (meaning Payment Service Provider) – probably the most popular in the UK are PayPal and WorldPay – and they will be more than glad to do it for you.
Make sure that you carefully selected payment provider offers additional security measures, such as 3D security (when you enter additional info, before sending your payment approve), address verification system (that checks the specified customer address, comparing it with the actual address of the credit card owner), or card verification system (CVV).
When you refer to payment providers, your customer payments are automatically forwarded to the PSP’s totally secure and protected infrastructure and you can stop worrying about the customers’ private data and the risk of its loss.
- Don’t keep something that can be stolen. Sometimes we find it hard to throw something away, even if we’re absolutely sure that we don’t need it any more. But even if keeping our old collection of pocket classic cars for nostalgic reasons can do no more harm than some dust on the shelf, keeping your old business records and databases can be dangerous.
- Mind the human factor. Even if you own a small online store, you might have someone who helps you. No matter how big your team is, every employee should get security training to avoid data loses and thefts. It may seem self-intuitive, but they should always keep in mind that they should never reveal sensitive and private data in emails of text messages. They should be also aware of relevant regulations that govern customer data management as well as required measures to keep this data safe.
- Real-time analytics is your ‘security camera’. Never stop tracking your webstore performance and performance of your customers online. Monitoring your visitors’ activity within your e-Commerce store gives you more chances to notice frauds, timely get some alerts and warnings and be able to take measures to prevent the crime. Wherever your website is hosted, make sure they make regular scanning for malware and viruses.
In the recent years, cyber attacks and internet crimes have gradually strengthened their positions due to the unprecedented growth of technological innovations. However, the digital world has given us highly effective tools to protect our business. The list is wide and you’re free to choose the one that suits you best.