People these days do a lot of shopping online regardless of the season. The ease and joy of buying online are simply too enticing to some. Think about it, no more lugging of shopping bags, no need to walk the entire store for the right coffee maker. Almost everything you need can be found and purchased online.
However, all these online shopping includes lots of personal information— home addresses, phone numbers, and credit cards—will be on the Internet. All those data translates to money for cybercriminals who are always on the lookout to exploit any weakness.
Business data protection online
All e-commerce transactions are vulnerable to attacks. Moreover, online shoppers are vulnerable to scams including phishing or fraudulent websites, Man-in-the-Middle attacks, pop-ups, spam/phishing emails, social engineering attacks, and even fraudulent charities or causes.
Once visitors give you (an online retailer or service provider) their information, it’s your job to protect the data that they gave, so it’s normal for them to be careful who to trust with their information online. But how do they know who to trust? How would they know if a site is legitimate and if they should give you their data?
How visitors check websites to see if it’s safe before transacting
Before giving any information to a website, visitors need to make sure it is secure. Below are some ways they may use to tell if your site is secure.
Visitors check the SSL certificate
Many visitors now know that they need to look at the URL of the website. Website addresses that begin with “https” instead of “http” just means the site is secured via SSL Certificate with the “s” standing for secure. SSL Certificates are used to secure the data in the website as it is passed from the visitor’s browser to the website’s server. To get an SSL Certificate, the website needs to go through a validation process.
There are however a few different levels of validation. Some of them are easier to acquire than others. Domain Validation (DV) is the lowest level of validation and simply validates ownership of the domain and not the organization’s legitimacy. Therefore, if you bought the domain “primeshoes.com” and requested a certificate for it, you would get it easily since you own the domain.
Extended Validation (EV) is the highest level of validation and the safest while being the most extensive. Extended Validation requires the company requesting the certificate to verify their identity and their business legitimacy as well. Users may be able to see if a site has an EV certificate when looking at the address bar. Browsers show a green address bar that also bears a lock icon for websites with EV certificates.
Now that you know some of the ways visitors use to check if your website is safe before they buy or use your services, you must do everything in your power to ensure that their entire buying journey throughout your website is safe from the landing page to the checkout page. One of the first and top ways to ensure that your site is safe is by making use of a reliable SSL certificate security provider which you can acquire via web hosting providers.
