This is a growing era of online shopping – there are around 3.11 Billion people using the internet on their smart devices. This huge audience can be captured by your business, but only if you provide a safe environment for them. When online shopping there is a lot of sensitive personal information transferred including financial details, addresses, contents of a cart, etc… Information shared by the user needs highest level of security.
Frequently Asked Question on SSL Certificate and Online Transactions
Frequently Asked Question on SSL Certificate and Online TransactionsWhat is an SSL Certificate?
SSL is a secure communication protocol. An SSL (Secure Socket Layer) Certificate is a digital file that identifies your web server and encrypts data transmitted between you and your users – securing their communication between client (Browsers) and server.
You may have also heard of TLS, which is usually used interchangeably with SSL. The certificates are the same, TLS is just the technical name for the newer versions of the protocol.
How SSL Certificate Secures Communications?
- When visiting a site with an SSL Certificate, the browser will request to share identity of the server.
- The server sends the browser a copy of the SSL Certificate.
- Now the browser will check the SSL Certificate to determine if it should be trusted. The browser knows who issued the SSL Certificate, and accepts or rejects the SSL Certificate.
- The browser will then initiate the secure session with the server if it accepted the certificate, or display a warning to the user if the certificate was rejected.
- Now a user can safely and securely browse your site and conduct transactions.
Why security is important for Online Transactions?
While doing transaction online the user needs to share his personal information, including their Full Name, Address, Mobile Number, etc… and financial information such as Credit/Debit Card data, User_Id, password, etc… If the online transactions or the whole website is not secured with encryption provided by SSL, then it will become the wake-up call for users to shop elsewhere and for cyber criminals to attack and breach user information.
How to secure online transaction?
To secure online transactions websites needs to provide identity authentication and encryption via an SSL Certificate. Did you know that SSL Certificates are only widely trusted way of performing these functions on the internet?
SSL Certificates can offer incredibly strong encryption, configurable to suit the needs of everyone from online shops, to banks, to government services. The industry standard 2048-bit keys and SHA-2 hashing algorithms are very hard for attackers to break.
To give further assurance to your visitors, you can use SSL Certificates with Organization Validation and Extended Validation SSL Certificate will work perfect to secure E-commerce Websites.
| Organization Validation (OV) SSL | Extended Validation (EV) SSL | |
|---|---|---|
| Business Validation | Yes | Yes |
| Green Address Bar | No | Yes |
| Trust Seal (Logo) | Yes | Yes |
| Encryption Length | 256-Bit | 256-Bit |
You can check security of an e-commerce website by looking for the following signals:
(i) Address Bar: First check the URL bar, if you find that website is starting with HTTPS and business name is visible in address bar that means it is secured with Organization Validation SSL Certificate.
Additionally, if you find website URL bar in Green color along with organization’s name that indicates website is secured with highest encryption level of EV SSL Certificate.
(ii) Status bar Color:
- Security Status Bar color is Red: The website is not trusted.
- Security Status Bar is Yellow: Website’s authentication is not verified by certificate authority.
- Security Status Bar is White: It indicates the certificate has normal validation and communication between the client and server is encrypted.
- Security Status Bar is Green: Website is secured with EV SSL Certificate and the identity of that website is verified by the certificate authority.
(iii) Trust Seal: Not only EV SSL Certificate, you also need to check the trust seal on that website, the trust seal carries information of that website as Domain Name, Address, Contact Number, SSL Type, SSL Expiration Period, etc… once you click on the trust seal you will get all the details about that E-commerce.
Note: The Trust seal must be from Trusted Certificate Authority.
What are the risks of Unsecured E-commerce website?
Study shows unsecured website is more vulnerable; cyber criminals can easily attack and breach user’s information.
Attackers can do following things with unsecured website
- Breach user’s personal and financial information
- Exploit Malware in user’s system and website
- Breach website’s data base
- Keep track on user’s activities
How to Secure and E-Commerce website
As per the detailed study on SSL Certificate and E-commerce website security, you should install an EV SSL Certificate on your server. It will secure your website, server, customer’s data, transaction information and user’s financial & sensitive information.
