Secure Your Ecommerce Store This Holidays With These Simple Tips

by Czarina R. Content Manager and SEO

Secure your ecommerce store as holiday shoppers continue to prepare to spend online. It is critical that customers feel at ease while they are doing their shopping in your ecommerce shop.

Before everyone goes for the holiday vacation, I thought it would be proper for us to leave some kind of a reminder for all ecommerce managers out there. These tips are meant to give you a check list of things to secure to avoid any loses due to security breach on your ecommerce system.

Let's go straight to the point

#1. Secure your ecommerce store with HTTPS.

If your ecommerce website is not yet on https, change it immediately before everything is too late. Buy an SSL certificate NOW. HTTPS allows your website to avoid online frauds.

Google uses HTTPS as a ranking signal to give your website a higher SERP ranking and hence, more visitors. HTTPS is essential for user protection as it creates a secure link between the users’ browsers and your servers to prevent hackers from stealing your data.

#2. Make sure you build your ecommerce store on a relatively secure platform

One of your top priority when building a secure ecommerce website is to use a secure platform. There are so many open source ecommerce platforms available for your out there. Choosing the best ecommerce platform can sometimes be difficult.

Here is the numbers: More than two third of all active E-commerce sites are using either Magento or WordPress WooCommerce. However, a lot of security vulnerability complaints in the web also comes from websites built on these platform. The most secure platform in our opinion is Thirtybees! Thirtybees ecommerce platfom is an intuitive platform that is light and fast, and relatively secure. In almost 20 years of experience working with different open-source platforms, I find Thirtybees to be the safest so far. But then again, it is not without fault.

Why is it relatively secure?

Mainly because of their sophisticated security features. There are other factors as well, but what makes them stand apart is the extensive security.

PrestaShop can be yet another choice with a proven security framework. However, it has unresolve bugs that has never been given attention by developers, at least to our knowledge!

No matter which platform you decide to use, go for security first rather than how it is being marketed.

#3. Secure your ecommerce store with user level information

User lever information, is a security feature for user levels. Guest have unique user level, registered users have another user level information, administration have another level of user information, etc.

Here is how it is defined:

Part of an access control procedure for computer systems, which allows a system administrator to set up a hierarchy of users. Thus, the low level users can access only a limited set of information, whereas the highest level users can access the most sensitive data on the system. Also called access rights.

Source

#4. Secure your ecommerce store by NOT storing sensitive customer data

Sensitive customer data are information that must be protected against unauthorized access. These data normally pertains to financial information of the user. Information like credit card numbers, passwords, and the like are sensitive customer data. Access to these sensitive data should be limited through sufficient data security to prevent unauthorized disclosure and data breaches.

#5. Secure your ecommerce store by doing regular backups

The purpose of the backup is to create a copy of your store files and database that can be recovered in the event of server or system failure. Failures can be the result of server or software failure, file and data corruption, or a human-caused event, such as a malicious attack (virus or malware), or accidental deletion of data. Backup copies allow data to be restored from an earlier point in time to help your ecommerce website recover from an unplanned event.

For best results, backup copies should be made on a consistent, regular basis to minimize the amount data lost between backups. The more time passes between backup copies, the more potential for data loss when recovering from a backup. Retaining multiple copies of data provides the insurance and flexibility to restore to a point in time not affected by data corruption or malicious attacks.

#6. Implement CDN

Although not directly a security measure, CDN improves your ecommerce store in a lot of ways. You must be well aware of that annoying delay caused due to the lapse in between the loading of web page and the content appearing on it. This delay could be because of the physical distance of your website's server to the user. CDN reduces this lapse time and make the content readily and immediately available.

When a user requests your site, the node closest in proximity to the user will deliver the static content, ensuring the shortest distance for the data to travel (reduced latency), therefore providing the fastest site experience.

Here are few reasons why CDN is important for your website

CDN distributes the content closer to the visitors by shifting it to the closest network node. This reduces the loading time of the page and thus increases the speed of the website. In other words CDN helps to reduce the bounce rate as the visitors and the users stay on the website due to good speed.

Increase the redundancy. In CDN the nodes are distributed hence they can withhold a large amount of traffic and can handle hardware failure better than other servers.

Cost Effective. Since there are many nodes in this network the load is equally distributed and hence the load on one server reduces. The only cost you will have to bare is that of the CDN which is lesser than the additional hardware you will have to implement otherwise.