Ecommerce is not a jargon anymore. In contrast to the old days of telling stories about how you sell online & if they purchase online, now the question is, “How often do you shop online?” People are now adaptable to the changing trends and getting benefited from them without any hassle. This might make you feel that getting sales on your ecommerce store is somewhat easy. But, believe us, it’s not a cakewalk anyway.

Selling online adds equal the amount of responsibility on your shoulders like that of traditional selling. There are pros and cons to selling online, but some of these challenges can be a serious threat to your business. While customers are shopping & you are selling online, the common concern is that of security. From the customer’s database to payment, technology gives you easy access to everything & the same is the worrisome thing for businesses.

Be it an unprocessed data, but it is precious if it goes in the wrong hands. When you are planning to launch an online store, you must know everything about these security threats & how you can thrive.

The list of your business threats include:

• DDoS attacks: Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks are known to create a copy of distinct types of orders from untraceable IPs. Most of such bogus orders are made with COD payment options & take place because of malicious activities on IoT devices. Since the devices are connected to the network, malware attacks can be the reason behind your customers’ access to the database.Thus, on a certain day, when you receive a lot of orders, you must not simply turn crazily happy to process orders, rather check if they are genuine. Keep an eye on regular sales of your store & check for IP addresses of orders. You can trace the order & shipping location for all of your orders to understand the fraud transactions if any.More cases of DDoS attacks occur in the festive season, as the sellers are busy & awaiting a large count of orders. The intensity of such attacks at your store can risk the reputation of your brand. To offer trouble-free & secure experience to your customers, check for data protection & security software that can help you discriminate against fake IPs, create security rules, check with hardware compatibility, and so on.

• Financial Frauds: The loss for once is the forever breach of trust of that of customers, especially in terms of financial frauds. It can be credit card fraud or phishing activity.
  • Credit card fraud: The net banking & related payment frauds can be considered one of the primary reasons customers select a COD option or leave the cart if that’s unavailable. It also includes the event of usage of personal security credentials like pin code, CVV by tracing the user activity and usage of keys on a virtual keyboard. To avoid such circumstances, you need to enable an address verification system to check the similarity of shipping & billing address.
  • Other frauds: It includes net banking frauds that can occur by phishing activities on your site. In such a case, when a customer will navigate to the checkout page, some additional links to third-party sites may get open. Like any other website, they can fetch the user activity & keep track of transactions happening on your ecommerce store. The hackers can use the idea of shell payments to make the fraud transactions through your store on the name of any of your users. To maintain your site’s security, keep doing the trial testings to get a better understanding of activities happening at your store.
• E-skimming: The illegal practice of playing with the checkout page of the website with the criminal aptitude is referred to as e-skimming. The idea of misguiding users to multiple external links on a single click, cross-site scripting, unauthorized access to user accounts, or personal information happens to be the part of e-skimming. The payment gateway is crucial for an ecommerce store, so you better understand the seriousness of the situation & how it can turn the tables. SSL certification is the primary thing to count on & earning the security badges will be equally profitable. Having a team of technical experts handling the backend will always help keep track of such evil activities at your site.

• Malicious bot activities: Threat to your business is not only from hackers, rather it can be your competitors. Yes, that’s not so common; but rivals can be rivals if they are not fans of fair competition. The bad bots can make it challenging for you.Well, bots are known to scroll your site and list them on search engines for user’s queries. The good bots walk with the algorithms, analyze your site & happen to be fruitful for your business. Contrarily, bad bots are known to increase the traffic on your site, track user activity at your store, try to get unauthorized access to the backend of your store, or create the shell pricing of the products listed on your store. The bad bots are nothing but the software designed to conduct activity on any website as the pseudo-user. You can bar such acts by increasing the security measures like enabling two-factor authentication, adding CAPTCHA code, OTP verification, limiting the account login attempts, etc.

• Consumer frauds: If you are a business selling on the marketplaces, you must be already aware of the customer frauds. Though it’s not a major threat to your business as the rate of customer fraud is not that significant, it will impact your business’s net profit. Whenever the customer returns the product or for replacement, there can be a case when a customer may not send the same product, especially if the payment policies are designed to give an instant refund. Significant brands like Amazon offer an instant refund to the customers in such cases. Thus, sellers suffer from the loss of returns. While you create the return & refund policy for your online store, keep this thing in mind & don’t forget to mention the slot of the product return window & the amount that will be processed on return.

To maximize your online store’s security, check with the authenticity of the ecommerce platform on which you are launching your store. You can compare them based on security attributes and inbuilt features to select the best one for your business. If you need free assistance from the experts beforehand, feel free to drop your queries at support@builderfly.com.