3 Tips for Secure Online Trading

Having an online store can make the consumer experience a little bit easier, especially if you want to provide your goods and services to those who may not be located nearby, or even able to get to a physical store during open hours.

To be able to give a good consumer experience when trading online, you may need to think about the ways that you can increase security, both for your customers, and your site as a whole. If customers feel like there is a risk to their private information, or that it is not being secured and used properly, this may prevent them from completing a transaction with your business.

One of the ways that you can increase your web store’s security can be through the use of card validation. Having 3D secure authentication may require an extra step from your clients, but can give another level of protection. This may involve them solving a captcha code, needing to log into a banking app and authorize a transaction, or even receiving an SMS or telephone call with a code that they must input for the payment to go through. One of the benefits of this for you, the business owner, can be fewer chargebacks received through unauthorized or fraudulent payments.


If customers are able to use online accounts with your web store, there may also be a risk of these getting hacked, and private data becoming compromised. One of the ways you might be able to reduce the likelihood of this occurring can be through the use of customer passwords.

You could opt to make it a mandatory requirement that customers change their passwords regularly, such as every 3 months. Alternatively, you could also require secure passwords to be used when a customer creates this account. By combining a number of letters, digits, and even special characters, while reminding customers to avoid using the same password that they do for other sites, data breaches may be less likely to happen.

On your end, you might also be able to help prevent data breaches and other viruses from affecting the security of online trading. Many website hosts offer the use of security plugins as a standard part of their service. By installing these, you can decrease the likelihood of hacking attempts becoming successful. They may also be able to alert you to any attempts, as well as retain data that could be used by the authorities to seek out who has tried to harm your business. You can also secure the information held on your server through the use of SSL certificates. It can be easy to tell whether or not you already have this service. A web address beginning with HTTPS implies that this security is in place, whereas HTTP shows that it is not present.

Trading securely online can help to protect yourself and your customers from the loss of finances and personal data. By doing all you can to keep your website safe, the risk of this occurring could be lessened greatly.