eCommerce Security: 7 Ways to Protect E-Commerce Customer Data
eCommerce has changed the way customers used to shop before. But one of the biggest problem merchants facing right now is with customer data security. The world is going to eCommerce and seen that data of customer details are consistently targeting by hackers.
According to a report from Verizon investigations, it is been found that 71 percent of the 855 data breaches occur with an eCommerce store.
It is one of the major responsibility of Store owners to tightening things up and ensure to give a secure environment to their customers to do shopping.
Many clients had get back to me with the same issue, They used to say “Ronak, Our store is hacked in someway, we are losing customers and it seems to be closed very soon Please Help”
I and My team are helping clients with protecting their stores from attackers since 2009. Based on my experience and our research I have jotted down these 8 perimeters which are extremely important to protect your eCommerce store from the customer data leaks.
1. Collect Only Data You Will Use
Someone has said, “Take as much responsibility as much you can bear until it becomes your utmost liability”.
When you analyze the store of clients, First Silly Mistake that I notice every time was about too much data.
Yes! You heard it right
The website was collecting too much data from the customers, which was not needed at first place.
Generally, you need to think that when the customers’ lands on the website, What would be the details you acquire from your customers at the first place.
It is easy to collect customer email id, contact details or even their payment credentials like credit and debit card details, Before asking for it just have a second thought is there need to collect so much sensitive information.
Because if it gets the leak it can cause serious trouble for your customers.
2. Let Third-party Providers Handle Payment Credentials Info.
If details like the payment credentials like the credit card or debit card of the customers can be compromised then they can be trouble as hackers can use it for own good.
One of my client from New York had the same issue, He was having the online furniture store, suddenly he starts receiving complaints from the customers that their account credentials are been compromised and used by someone related to your website.
He was confused and tried to research about this but nothing happened.
When he came to me and tell me the issue, My engineers look down to the code of the website and we found website was asking their customers to store their payment credential for faster future payments and that’s what problem was.
During my analysis, we came across many eCommerce stores which ask their customers to store their payment details and put their customers in danger.
Storing such sensitive information online is only increased the risk of data theft or leak. In fact, it is one of main violation of the PCI standards.
Let your third-party payment processor handle this stuff for you. Such as PayPal, Authorize.Net, Stripe and their alternatives.
They have a strong ultra-secure environment and securely take a care of customer data. So It would be appropriate to let them handle credit card information.
3. Use of SSL
Transmission of information over the internet is always insecure, as there are high chances of information theft.
One of my client from Poland had the issue related to security. He was having eCommerce marketplace and not got the single order in 4 months. When our engineer looks into the website we analyze it was victimized due to brute force attack. Someone has tried to hack the website and got the access to the customer data.
This thing can affect the store in two form.
- 1) As the store is not verified, it becomes very hard for the customers to trust the store. As result store was facing high abandonment rates
- 2) Customers data can be compromised as the information transmission was plain.
We suggested the client buy SSL certificate. Secure Socket Layer is the certificate that encrypts the data exchange between the web server and customer.
It is one of the best way to improve the security you can provide to your customers. Due to this information transmitted to your customers’ devices and web server will be encrypted hence there are no chances of data leakages.
SSL certificates are not much costly and you can buy it from reputed leaders like VeriSign, GeoTrust, Comodo, and Digicert.
4. Educate Your Customer
Create a awareness among the customer regarding any suspicious behavior on the site is the best thing you can do to prevent customer data leak.
Related Article: 10 Ways To Make Your E-Commerce Start-Up Stand Out In 2018
Because hackers are too smart and more advanced with technologies, so there could be the situation where you feel everything is protected and secure but they could affect the customer data by brute force attack.
Teach them like how they can spot suspicious or malicious activity on your website and can inform you, in case something goes wrong.
5. Review Who Has Access To What
According to research by infosecbuddy, More than 62% of organizational data leaks originated from the insiders.
You need to review and define access to kind of data particular actors have it in your website.
Check for the people in your teams can have the right to make changes to master data and control such access rights is beneficial for maintaining the security of the website.
Make sure you assign the access controls for the entire website for admins, vendors and even customers.
In the e-commerce industry, this translates into setting up access controls for admins, vendors and even customers.
6. Be PCI DSS Compliant
The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) is a by the major credit card brands including Visa, MasterCard, American Express, Discover, and JCB.
It is always necessary for the website which deals with online money transfer. It is been adopted by most brands in the world. It ensures and establishes as one that is secure and safe to transact the money.
It has different packages and according to your transactions limit, you can buy a plan to get security against information theft.
7. Keep Updated With Security Patches
If you are an eCommerce store owners then you need to understand that eCommerce is not the one-time deal. Some of the people may be thinking that setting up a store is enough to sell the products online. Which is absolutely WRONG!!!
Each and every day new malware and vulnerabilities grow and think if you haven’t updated your store then how it going to protect against this malware which are triggered by the hackers.
Related Article: 10 Ecommerce Product Optimization Tips Boost Your Conversion By 200%
eCommerce store which is not updated to the latest package are more likely to be data compromised.
As per my experiences, most of the clients that came to us for support were had the same issue. They haven’t updated their store to the latest security patch due to which they have faced serious security consequence upon our investigation we discover it was due to the same thing.
So if you having an eCommerce store and not keeping it up to date with the latest update then there are very high chances that intruder might attack your store.
Conclusion
If you have gone through the articles you can understand how vital these perimeters are if you want to ensure a complete protected shopping environment for your customers.
If your store is not doing good business then information theft of customers then this could be one of the reasons behind it.
Make sure you follow all perimeter of your store to give your customers a healthy environment and increase your customer engagement and conversion rate.
In the comment section please let me know if you had such experience and if you need to help regarding your eCommerce website, Please contact us for the free consultation.
Ronak Meghani
