In the past few years, ecommerce frauds have increased substantially, with companies facing enormous challenges in protecting their valuable business information. Data breaches have become more common among enterprises which makes it crucial for businesses to stay vigilant about security issues and deploy the best possible measures to prevent loss of data. Ecommerce frauds can take place across any online platform using fake or stolen credit cards including using false identity and advertising.
Best ways to ensure protection for online sites is by applying given steps to safeguard the interests of their customers.
What are the different kinds of ecommerce threats?
As per studies conducted by Worldpay among 274 merchants across six countries and multiple industries, 71% of the respondents believed identity theft to be their biggest security concern followed by 66% of the respondents claiming phishing to be next threat. On the other hand, 63% of the participants cited account theft to be their major challenge.
- Identity theft
In this type of fraud, hackers can target personal information including names, email addresses or phone numbers as it is easy to carry out transactions using an existing identity of the victim.
- Phishing
Phishing refers to the use of fraudulent websites, text messages and emails for accessing personal information. There could be attacks on ecommerce providers for stealing customer information and sometimes using malware to deceive the website visitors and direct them to fraudulent websites.
- Account takeover
This type of fraud involves using stolen personal information related to a bank or ecommerce store account holder to have access of the account. In this way, the fraudster targets the victim’s account to make purchases unauthorized by the account holder.
7 smart ways to safeguard your ecommerce store from fraudsters
- Choose the right e-commerce platform
There are plenty of ecommerce platforms that are available for building your online store that are equipped with a host of features and functionality. Apart from the price and monthly costs, it is crucial to look at the security features offered by different ecommerce platforms. BigCommerce, Magento, Shopify are some of the trusted platforms that may assist owners to build their store using a Software-as-a-Service and can take care of your website security concerns as well.
- Maintain PCI compliance
The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) has provided a set of requirements for companies that store, process, or share credit card information such as online merchants to provide a secure environment. PCI can be effective in protecting customer related data. PCI compliance comprises of basic security protocols such as changing factory passwords across networks and using a firewall for your Internet connection along with systems that store credit card numbers.
- Ensure website security using HTTPS
Secure Sockets Layer (SSL)is a security standard that ensures data passed between browsers and web servers is kept private and confidential among users and can be viewed by intended recipients. SSL is regarded to be extremely important for maintaining security of all ecommerce transactions while ensuring financial and personal information remains safe in the online purchase process. This provides greater trust and confidence among online shoppers while providing them assurance at the same time. Most ecommerce sites have different sub domains like for blog page, payment page and more. Wildcard SSL certificates can be especially useful in securing multiple sub domains of a single domain. It will save your time and money.
- Use system alerts to get information on fraud
There are software platforms that may provide alerts about any kind of suspicious activities that may occur on the system including multiple orders placed by single person by using different credit cards. In some instances, phone numbers may not match with the area code of the shipping address. Ecommerce platforms such as PayPal havefraud management filters that enable to sort and screen transactions using stringent fraud monitoring measures.
- Use tracking numbers for customer orders
There are certain instances of chargeback frauds also known as friendly fraud, where the customers make false claims regarding the product not being delivered to them and demand a refund of their money. Tracking numbers may be useful in such cases to get confirmation about product delivery to the customer. In addition, using a signature on delivery is yet another effective method for preventing this type of fraud.
- Include two factor authentication
With security breaches becoming quite common among enterprises, it is essential to seek protection against phishing and identity thefts. There are many ecommerce stores that use two factor authentication that helps to add an extra layer of protection to the online store. There are two ways to identification that the user needs to be provide using this process. One of the username and password and the second one is the code generated on the mobile phone in real time which needs to be verified by the user. It’s easy to crack the password, but almost impossible to steal the code as it expires after a few minutes.
- Have a virtual private network
It is necessary to be extremely vigilant about using public networks for making financial transactions. This is because data across public networks may be tampered by malicious users and a VPN service can prove to be effective in such cases. VPN uses an encrypted connection by connecting to secure server and prevents third party from intercepting your communication.
Conclusion
Ecommerce stores need to ramp up their security measures especially if they are relying on advanced security mechanisms such as using password security, malware scans and seeking anti-virus protection. Investing in SSL certification can be a step ahead in preventing hacking attempts by intruders and boosting the security of your website.
