While our family tries to shop locally, we often find what we need on the Internet. If your business and family is like ours, you are in the same boat.
If you have an online business, and want to increase sales, do you have a digital ID (SSL) set up so that the shopping cart area uses “https” ?
If the answer is no, why are you not using SSL?
Back in 1995, when Dynamic Net, Inc. was known as PMP Computer Solutions (PMPCS), my answer was due to costs. I looked at the yearly cost of a digital ID as an expense, I just could not afford at the time. Especially as a new start up business. Every penny counted.
Yet, as we started offering more and more products and services online, people were not buying. Carts were abandoned (that’s where a consumer adds items to the shopping cart, but never completes the transaction). Why where they giving up? Was the process too complex?
It turned out to be many, related, reasons:
- Concerns over identity theft since personal and credit card data was not being encrypted by a digital id.
- Concerns over credit card theft because the data was not being encrypted by a digital id.
- Concerns we were a fly by night company because we were being too cheap to purchase a digital id to protect ourselves, and our customers.
According to the Gartner survey in August 2006, approximately $913 million in 2006 e-commerce sales is lost because of security concerns among online shoppers. Another $1 billion is lost because of shoppers who refuse to shop online because of security concerns.
While that survey is now more than five years old, the foundation of it is still valid.
Consumers still want to know you care about their security as well as your own. They want to be sure you are a solid company who, if you are going to accept their personal information and credit card, are going to do your best to protect that information.
Plus, if you want to be a PCI compliant merchant (which does often lower your cost to accept credit cards), you should have a digital id to help protect your site.
Does a digital id protect your entire site from hackers?
No. A digital id only encrypts information between the consumer’s browser and your web server. While that matters greatly in helping to protect consumer data being sent from their browser to your web server, it doesn’t stop hackers from getting into vulnerable applications or vulnerable servers.
Merchants who want to invest in a secure infrastructure will work with a managed hosting provider who will proactively take care of security for the server, and hold the merchants hand to help their individual ecommerce site be secure above and beyond PCI compliance.
A digital id will inspire more sales. A managed hosting provider will help the merchant have more sales because they and their consumers will have a greater piece of mind about being more secure.
Contact us for more information.