Complete Guide to eCommerce Website Security and Data Protection

eCommerce businesses are growing rapidly in the past few years, and even expected sales of over $6 trillion in the coming future.  eCommerce growth got increased after the 2019 pandemic. But a little growth has to pay its price; the eCommerce sector was under great harm of cybercrime a few years back, which caused a great loss to the products and services providers and also to the trust of customers.

According to research, 2020 saw an increase in cyber crimes, and about 69% of eCommerce stores were affected. These types of cyber-attacks may lead to breaches of confidential documents and valuable data.

Customers will buy any product from the website or eCommerce store based on trust, trust is the foundation of success in any field. Thus, it’s important to gain the trust of the customer for a better shopping experience.

If you don’t want to lose the customer’s trust in your website, make sure to protect your site from cybercrime. With the help of Custom eCommerce website development, you can protect your site against cybercrime.

Benefits of Securing an eCommerce Website

Here are some key benefits one should keep in mind while securing an eCommerce website from cybercrime:

• Help in improving Google SEO
• Better Rankings
• Security of customer’s data
• Protection against lawsuit
• Increase in website reasonability
• Higher ROI

Common eCommerce Security Threats

There are various kinds of cyber attacks against eCommerce sites, and they mostly target stealing customers’ data, passwords, or documents

• Financial Fraud:
  
  All financial frauds take place during any type of transaction and financial transfer. Such frauds took place by:
• Use of Credit/Debit cards
• Doing any Unauthorized Transactions
• Fake Returns and Refunds Requests

• Social Engineering:
  
  It is a bold term and includes various tactics to manipulate people or influence them to get control over their system or to steal financial and personal problems also known as ‘human hacking’.

• Phishing:
  
  These types of cybercrimes take place when the attackers manipulate the customers or make them download viruses and malware through emails, text messages, and sometimes phone calls.

• DDoS Attacks:
  
  These types of attacks are done by sending a high volume of traffic, and making the website slow and quite difficult to use. Attackers use these types of attacks so that the victim will face reputational damage and they can get financial gain by blackmailing them.

• Brute Force Attacks:
  
  These types of attacks are automated attacks where attackers use the trial-and-error method to guess confidential passwords or phrases for financial gain. These types of attacks are done usually to target the admin panels and the customer’s account.

• Cross-Site Scripting (XSS):
  
  The attackers inject the harmful scripts into the code of the browser and run on the client side to use user data.

• E-Skimming:
  
  This type of method is used to capture the financial and personal information of the users by inserting the E-Skimming code.

• Malware:
  
  Malware is designed to attack the website to steal data or send spam messages from your domain to provide side activity. Trojan horses and Ransomware are some types of Malware.

How to Secure Your eCommerce Website

One of the first steps to protect an eCommerce Website is it contains more valuable things like data, including inventory, pricing, and sensitive user information that cybercrime may exploit. To avoid these things you should take care of the following:

Choose a Secure eCommerce Platform

Various eCommerce platform providers have proven that they provide better service and proper security to users. Some of the leading eCommerce secure platforms are as follows:

• Magento
• Shopify
• BigCommerce
• Squarespace

2. Switch to HTTPS

Hyper Text Transfer Protocol Secure can be defined as Internet communication practices, which are used to write and safely pass the information between a user and the website through which they are connected with. It is designed for the better protection of the honesty and confidentiality of users’ information when they visit your websites.

3. Secure eCommerce Host

Various eCommerce platforms provide services to the customer with the help of off-site solutions like Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services. Many web hosts also provide services like payment processing, backups, caching, email services, etc. Go for a hosting provider that contains:

• SSL certificates
• DDoS protection
• Domain name privacy
• PCI Compliance
• Firewalls
• Spam filters
• Virus & malware detection and removal
• Encryption
• Automated backup
• Access controls that contain strong authentication
• Strong customer support
• Network monitoring to notify about potential threats
• Physical security for servers such as security cameras and gated access

4. Protect your Admin Area

To secure these types of sensitive servers and admin panels, make sure to

• Change the default admin area
• Modify the default administrator username and password
• Assign credentials by an individual
• Restrict access to the admin area
• Tell the supervisor of failed login attempts from unknown IP addresses
• Use strong confirmation practices

5. Automate Backup

To protect against any kind of cyber attack, it’s important never to lose customers or purchase information. Backups are very important as sometimes websites can’t rely on the web hosts. The options that are left are either to do it manually or automatically.

It’s all up to you what are you choosing for your site.

6. Secure Payment Gateways

Payment Gateways are safer services to work with debit cards or credit card payments. You have to choose payment gateways quite wisely. Keep in mind the following while choosing the best payment gateway:

• Secured with SSL
• Use Tokenization
• Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard
• ISO Certification

To Sum Up!

Ensure to take preventive measures and safe steps to prevent your site from cyberattacks. If you continuously facing problems of cyberattacks, you can contact professionals offering custom eCommerce website development services to make your website safer to use.