Building Customer Trust with Secure E-Commerce
Whether your e-commerce operation involves selling an entire
catalogue of items, a small collection of goods, or even just
one product, the simple reality is that unless people buy the
items for sale on your Web site, you won't make any money. And
while the last few years have done a lot to make consumers more
comfortable with the idea of shopping online, a significant
effort is still necessary, on your part, to convince a potential
consumer that they will be doing business with a secure and
trustworthy operation.
And because you'll have to employ some form of remote payment,
you'll have to do business with some type of transaction
processing business. And even more than your customers, your
billing solution partners will demand some assurance that your
operation is secure before they involve themselves in your
transactions.
To put it simply: in the e-commerce business, securing trust in
your company is essential to your success. Trust is as important
to a potential customer's purchasing decision as the products
you offer him. And an essential element of building that trust,
with both customers and partners, is the assurance that your
e-commerce operation meets the demanding security standards
required of organizations handling sensitive financial
information.
Setting up a Storefront
A big part of building trust with your customers is your
presentation. The very fact that they're browsing your online
store is a good indicator that they're familiar with the
possibilities of online shopping, and are prepared to consider
buying. What you do to convince them, and the effectiveness of
your efforts, may be the deciding factor in a possible sale.
The shopping interface you introduce to customers is arguably
the most important piece of your e-commerce site's presentation.
A familiar, easy-to-navigate interface can go a long way toward
establishing the trust you're after. Seasoned online shoppers
will know what to expect from an e-commerce site, and meeting
those expectations is a good way to gain their confidence. And
novice surfers will probably be more comfortable if your online
store closely resembles the major e-commerce interfaces they
might have encountered.
Building a storefront compatible with your customers'
expectations is one of the more obviously beneficial features of
using an e-commerce software product such as those provided by
Miva (www.Miva.com), BizCrafter (www.BizCrafterCorp.com) or
eCartSoft (www.eCartSoft.com) to
build your site. Most of these programs will help you to build a
simple, effective and familiar shopping interface that can
include pictures, shopping cart functions and a number of useful
security features.
In addition to helping you build an attractive online shop, most
e-commerce software has features allowing it to help manage your
inventory, interact with your payment processing systems,
simplify your relationships with suppliers and affiliates and
even promote your site.
E-commerce software can usually be purchased online from the
maker, but is also quite often included as part of a specialized
e-commerce package from any of the many Web hosts that support
such operations.
Finding a Commerce-Friendly Web Host
Assuming that this is one of your first efforts at building an
e-commerce Web site, it's a safe bet that you'll be outsourcing
most, or at least some of the site's technical operations to a
Web hosting company. This is by no means a bad thing, and in
fact can free up your time and IT resources, allowing you to
focus on the operations of the business itself.
More than simply freeing your time, however, many Web hosting
companies have plans tailored specifically to the needs of
customers developing or operating e-commerce Web sites. A few
hosting companies offering enhanced e-commerce features include
VIP PowerNet Web Hosting (www.VIPWH.com), ValueWeb (www.ValueWeb.com) and Global
Internet Solutions (www.GISol.com).
These commerce-friendly hosting plans often include a software
license for one of the storefront building programs with your
monthly fees, as well as a number of other support services,
designed to provide you with a secure platform from which to do
business.
And while software and services may be convenient, there are
other reasons why a host that understands e-commerce is critical
to your business. A good e-commerce host will already have the
means in place to secure your online transactions with protocols
such as SSL. It may be able to process transactions for you, or
help you set up a merchant account. And most importantly, it
will have the service level guarantees suitable to the high
demands of your e-commerce operation.
Of course, in addition to the products and services they
provide, it's hard to argue against the value of experience. And
a Web host well versed in e-commerce should be able to help you
by answering whatever questions you may have.
Securing Information Using SSL
At the core of any e-commerce operation is the financial
transaction between Web site and consumer. One of the most
common methods for accepting payment from your customers is
accepting the submission of credit card information online. But
by accepting your customers' credit card information through
your Web site, you are also accepting the responsibility for the
security of that information.
The standard protocol for securing communications on the Web is
Secure Sockets Layer (SSL). Developed by Netscape Communications
Corporation, the SSL security protocol provides data encryption,
server authentication, message integrity and client
authentication for TCP/IP connections, allowing client/server
applications to communicate in a way that prevents
eavesdropping, tampering or message forgery.
SSL is built into all major web-browsing software, so simply
installing a digital certificate on the server side of the
communication will turn on the browser's SSL capabilities. The
protocol is available in both 40-bit and 128-bit strengths,
referring to the length of the "session key" generated by each
encrypted transaction.
In order to establish an SSL session with a customer's browser,
your server has to be able to generate a public key and a
private key and have them authenticated by a certificate
authority, such as VeriSign (www.VeriSign.com), Thawte (www.Thawte.com), Tucows (www.Tucows.com) or InstantSSL (www.InstantSSL.com). Your Web host
may include an arrangement with one if these authorities, or may
allow you to use its certificate.
Processing Transactions
Once your customer is willing and able to give you his or her
credit card information, you still have to make arrangements to
be able to process the transaction and receive your payment.
Obviously, credit card processing is a complicated process, and
a number of organizations can be involved, from both your bank
and the user's bank to a credit card processing company and the
credit card communications network.
Your involvement in the processing operation will vary according
to how much of the responsibility you want to outsource. It can
be as simple as employing a "buy button" solution hosted by a
third party provider, where all you have to do is include a
piece of HTML code on your site and the processing company will
send you a check. But keep in mind that the more responsibility
you take on yourself, the smaller percentage of your profits
you'll have to hand over to service providers.
In a more hands-on solution, many of the storefront-building
software solutions include tools and ongoing support services to
handle payment processing functions. Your Web host may have
already set up this sort of pre-arranged processing option. For
storefronts not equipped to provide payment processing, there
are service providers, such as IBill (www.IBill.com) or CCBill (www.CCBill.com), designed to do just
that. These providers charge a scaling service that can reach as
high as 15 percent, for their services. And these charges can be
avoided by setting up your own merchant account.
If you decide to handle most of the processing yourself, saving
many of the fees associated with outsourced payment processing,
you'll have to enable your Web server and applications to send
and receive information from the credit card network. In order
to do this, you'll have to obtain your own merchant ID and
terminal ID, numbers that will identify you and the source of
your transactions. These IDs can be obtained from a merchant
bank by applying for a merchant account enabled to receive
payments by credit card. The merchant bank will have
relationships with acquiring banks that can handle both credit
card processing and Internet payments. Once the merchant bank
supplies you with merchant and terminal IDs, you'll use these
numbers to configure your payment software or provide them to
your outsourced processor.
There are plenty of responsibilities beyond security involved in
running an e-commerce Web site, not including managing the
supply chain relationships and inventory and, of course,
fulfilling your customers' orders. But, when dealing with the
sensitive data involved in processing customers' credit card
information, there can be no question that earning the trust of
your customers through a comprehensive and responsible approach
to security should be a primary concern.
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