Instilling Confidence in Your Customers
Most customers never stop to think twice about the security of their personal information when they go to the stores and whip out credit or debit card to pay for their purchases. This is as far as most people are concerned just a normal part of doing business and they never give it a thought. However, when it comes to shopping online, the whole picture changes as people have become very paranoid about giving any kind of personal information out online.
This has made it very tough for e commerce sites and if you want to run any kind of online retail site, you are not only going to have to provide complete protection for your customers, you are going to have to be able to prove that you are doing everything you can to protect their credit card and debit card info as well any other personal information you are likely to collect in the process of taking care of their orders.
If you have done any shopping online yourself, you will have noticed that the vast majority of reputable online retailers display a symbol that claims they are SSL certified and that all information collected is fully protected using SSL encryption technology. If you are not familiar with this, SSL is the abbreviation for Secure Socket Layer. This refers to a very specific form of encryption that is used to ensure that information that is transferred across the Internet is encrypted in such a way that even if it is intercepted, no one can decrypt it.
One thing you can be assured of, if you do not invest in some form of encryption or security that is going not only protect your site, but provide your customers with assurances that their personal information is well secured and protected, they are not going to stick around long enough to see if they get ripped off by an identity thief.
While it is all well and good to be using SSL encryption to protect all of the personal information you collect from your customers, if you do not take the extra step necessary to let them know that you are using the latest version of SSL encryption, you are wasting your time and money. If you are not going to let your customer know their information is protected in this way, they are going to treat you in much the same manner as they would if they know for sure that you were not offering any kind of protection whatsoever.
In other words, they are going to take their money and spend it all at a site that has not only gone to the effort of investing in an SSL certificate, but has also gone the extra steps needed to let all of their customers know that every transaction is fully protected. Generally this is accomplished by placing image of SSL seal on each page of your retail site, most especially on your checkout page so that no matter what page they are on, they are constantly being reminded that you have their privacy in mind and are doing everything you can to protect it.
When you use SSL encryption, your customers will be able to use their credit and debit cards as well as pay with PayPal if you are set up with full confidence that all information is very well protected. The way SSL encryption works is very simple; as the information is entered into your site by a customer it is fully encrypted. In other words every letter or number is turned into an unreadable data stream that can be stored or transmitted to the payment processing center. The only way anyone can decode it is if they have the same encryption key that you are using and the chances of that happening are very slim or nonexistent.
The whole idea is that on the off chance your transmission of this information should happen to be intercepted at any point along the way by a would be identity thief, there would be no way that they could ever convert any of the information back into useful data. This is the kind of protection your customers are going to demand before they are going to be willing to shop with you.
When you need to have SSL certification protection for your e commerce site, you will find that Digi-Sign offers complete certification services that are recognized and accepted worldwide. We can scale your certificate to fit from 100s to 100,000s of users to meet your increasing demands as your business grows.
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