6 Ways To Protect An eCommerce Website [Online Store] Against Hacks & Frauds

Have you taken enough steps to prevent your eCommerce website? Does your site is secure enough to fight against cyber criminals? According to the cybercrime reports, 60% of e-businesses are attacked in their startup of first six months. In most of the time, phishing & hacking are most common things occurred with and for the fraudulent payments. And to minimize the risk and to protect both yourself and your customers against the digital attacks you need to follow quick essential & actionable steps as described below. Protect Online Shopping Site Against Frauds, Hacking & Digital Attacks: Hackers are always in the pursuit of social security numbers, credit card details and other confidential data from the eCommerce sites. So, as a web developer or a designer online security should top the list of all your priority. With the right approach, you cannot just only save your e-business, but also the sensitive customer data.

Ways To Protect An Ecommerce [Online Store] Site Against Hacks And Frauds

Last time we have seen 7 Actionable Tips For A Better Performing eCommerce Website and today we are going to see how to secure online shopping site to prevent frauds and digital hacks.

Also check: Why Online Retailers Must Focus More on E-commerce Mobile Apps

6 Ways to Protect Ecommerce Site Against Hacking & Fraud

Hackers are always eager to steal your sensitive information like credit card or personal data from your e-commerce site. Get these quick tips from eCommerce & security expert about how to keep your shopping site away from frauds and hacks.

So, the real question is how you can ensure the safety of an eCommerce website? For you, we have listed below the best ways to deal with the security issues.

1. Choose The Most Secure Platform

Among all the available platforms, always opt for the one which uses a more sophisticated object-oriented programming language. They are far more secure & reliable than the others available. The reason what makes them better is because of the administrative panel that are made inaccessible to the hackers, with an exception to the internal network. This is what will remove you from the public facing servers prone to attacks. An additional secondary authentication can also be used to authenticate the users with the internal windows network.

2. Toughen The Password Requirement For You Customers

It is the responsibility of the retailer to keep the information of the customer's safe at the back end. But, you can also help the customer to help themselves by opting for a minimum number of characters, symbols, and numbers for a complex password. Though your customer might grumble at first, but it's better to be safe than getting hacked.

Do not just ask the customer to comply with your password requirements? Make them aware of the fact why they need a complex password and the extra information too. By doing so, you'll definitely gain some loyalty points for being honest and customer-centric.

3. Use Secure Encrypted Connections

An encrypted communication between the website and the browsers while transmitting confidential information is always encouraged. But, to keep the hackers at bay, it becomes immensely vital to maintaining and update strong encryption algorithms such as SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) or TLS (Transport Security Layer).

However, SSL certificates are the ones highly recommended to authenticate the identity of your business and encrypt that data in the transit. This helps to protect the customer's financial or important information from getting stolen along with preventing the fraudulent purchases.

4. Don't Store The Sensitive Data, Be PCI Compliant

The question is why would you even want to store the records of your customers' credit card numbers, expiration dates, and other codes? Well, according to us there isn't any reason? As per the regulation of the PCI Security Standards Council, any merchant who accepts debit/credit cards offline or online strictly needs to comply with its rules to keep the payment data of the customer secure else, face tough penalties.

So, the bottom line is: use an encrypted checkout tunnel to eliminate the need for your servers to even see sensitive data. The inconvenience caused to the customers that time will outweigh the risk of compromising their data. This way you won't be robbed, when you won't have anything to be stolen from.

5. Make The Use Of The Address And Card Verification Systems

The security of your eCommerce site lies in your own hand. It is acceptable to trust but never ever forget to verify your customers. Use the AVS, the fraud tool. It verifies the billing address of the credit card stored on it with the address on file at the credit card company. Whereas, the CVV is a three to four digit security code printed on the credit cards.

Since it cannot be stored with the rest of the details according to the PCI rules, it makes it virtually impossible for the fraudsters to get it unless they steal the card physically. Pay attention, if you are among those using extensions for payments and other services. Make sure to first of all get an extension from a trustworthy place such as Magento multi-vendor marketplace. And, to those do add theses systems to your defense parameters.

6. Monitor Your Site Regularly And Add System Alerts For Suspicious Activities

Managing an eCommerce website is one hell of a job, but without regular monitoring the whole system is incomplete. It can be done with the help of a real-time analytics tool, to ensure that hackers and identity thieves have not introduced malware, viruses or harmful software into the advertisements, graphics or the other content.

The process of scanning and monitoring also needs to be done regularly on the servers of your hosting provider. Do make sure; they have a plan that includes daily scanning, detection, and removal of the malware and viruses on the website while backing it up. Therefore, choose your web hosting provider wisely like BlueHost. Whereas, the same real-time analytics tool can also be used to receive alerts of the suspicious activities, allowing you to act quickly and prevent from causing any harm.

So, do not let your customers down. They are smart and prefer security over anything else. By following the above security measures, you can ensure that to your customers and make them happy.

Author Bio: Isha Singh
Isha Ranot is a technical writer. She has written many articles around various technologies, open source software, e-commerce platforms and online marketing strategies. Alongside writing new pieces, she loves reading stuff that connects to her niche.