Owners of Ecommerce Websites usually focus on delivering a high quality user experience, so that visitors will enjoy their buying experience. Other than the way products are presented, Ecommerce Security should be a crucial topic for both owners and users.

Unfortunately, most Ecommerce owners do not give enough consideration to security until something goes wrong, which is generally too late.

Hackers always try new ways to attack websites to gather information, deny access to your website, extract customer information, or redirect payments to their accounts.

Ecommerce owners have a responsibility to protect their clients against such events. Small brands, big brands they all have been attacked by hackers. The flaws in their safety can lead visitors to lose faith and trust in their services. Nobody likes having their financial and personal information exposed where they would not wish!

The good news is that you can do something to increase your Ecommerce’s security. Here are 6 quick, general tips:

1. Secure your website with HTTPS

Over 17% of online customers will leave the shopping process when they notice that a website is not secured with a HTTPS protocol.

The HTTPS protocol keeps the conversation between your website and your customers’ computer confidential. This means that when they submit their private or financial informations these are not easily subject to being intercepted by hackers.

You can notice whether a website, page or service is HTTPS-secured just by looking at the URL bar of your internet browser. If there is a little lock icon, or if the URL of the website starts with “https://”, then it is HTTPS-secured, otherwise is not.

Some browsers warn you when a website is not HTTPS-secured but you should always be wary when you are about to provide personal or financial informations.

2. Use strong passwords for your website accounts and change them frequently

Clients often ask us for easier passwords to remember for their website accounts. While we do not force them to keep their passwords strong, our suggestion always points towards that direction.

A strong password has at least 15 characters, is composed by both lowercase and uppercase letters, contains numbers and symbols (such as ? % ^ $ *). You can use this useful website to create a strong password.

3. Backup your website often

If you don’t do this yourself, arrange with your web developer to set up an automated website backup, possibly away from your premises.

This is a low cost solution that avoids a nightmare situation if your website ever gets hacked and all your products disappear.

4. Log out of your website when you’re not working on it

Frequently we find out that clients do not log out of their website and just walk away from the computer that remains logged on.

5. Avoid Open Wi-Fi hotspots when managing your website

Wi-Fi is great and, of course, we all love free Wi-Fi! Security levels on free Wi-Fi are often limited, though, and can easily be hacked.

This means that anything you type while connected to such Wi-Fi is open to being captured and used by hackers.

Being careful about what you do on free Wi-Fi is a general security rule and we share the common strong suggestion to wait until you are using secure connections before you use a credit card or give banking or password details that matter to you.

6. Update antivirus on computers and devices you use to manage your website

As obvious as it may be, we strongly suggest you to keep your antivirus and antimalware software updated. Also we invite you, of course, not to open emails from persons you do not know.

Also, don’t open attachments or click on links that you are unsure of. Email spam keeps getting more sophisticated. Spam emails don’t always carry a subject as silly as “Click here to download an important message”.

They can infect your computer and some of your actions can make the malware spread to your website, therefore to its users.

7. Also update your browser

Many good browsers, including Chrome and Firefox, can be extended with an increasing number of apps (or extensions or plugins). These apps can make life easier for you in many different ways.

Still, our suggestion is to always ensure that both these apps and your browser are up to date. Also, keep an eye out for those apps you didn’t install on purpose. They could be the kind of malware that opens up dozens of spam popups whenever you try to do something on the internet!

We develop Ecommerce, can we help you?

At Handyweb.ie we can help you improve your Ecommerce Security, as we can provide quality advise, put in place secure certificates (HTTPS) and setup automated backups.

We can perform a scan on your website, then clean, protect, and monitor it every day, preventing attacks from hackers and other vulnerabilities from arising.