E-commerce is now taking up a majority share in the global consumer market, which will continue to the point that almost all individuals make their purchases of nearly everything through the internet. Even though many tend to make physical purchases of goods and services now, most of them still do their product research on the internet to identify the best for them. It is a convenient way for both the buyer and the seller to find the products they are looking for. Digital transaction is becoming increasingly popular all over the world.
When it comes to online trading platforms, consumers want to have a quality experience interacting with products and services. The fundamental principle of success in the digital market is to have a highly secured and functional e-commerce site to interact with prospective consumers. So, cybersecurity should be there at the center stage of your considerations on setting up an e-commerce service. With any business having online operations, cybersecurity must be woven into the very fabric of digital operations, which has a compassionate impact on the e-commerce sector.
Ensure customer retention
The end goal of any consumer brand is to retain customers, which demands a careful approach to secure loyal customers and ensure they do not just make a single purchase, but willing to return to your website again and again to make further purchases. A loyal customer invests in a brand just as how a company invests in a consumer. Creating a strong foundation of trust with potential consumers is important to reduce the customer churn rate. E-com businesses should try to foster trust through transparent data collection and management. It is important to take the needed steps to communicate various protocols and document all your actions to protect the consumers.
Data privacy must be made propriety, which will help secure trust and convert your customers further into brand advocates. The e-com businesses may also go a step ahead by conducting customer feedback surveys to analyze the sentimental feedback and set the data privacy policies to their satisfaction.
Protecting corporate assets
Managing a reliable e-com business fully relies on having a skilled and highly responsible workforce to manage it. A team may consist of individual contributors from diverse backgrounds with varying talents to assist customers and guarantee business continuity. To maintain more efficiency and perform the given tasks, the team members need to access the data. In case of handling support tickets or to know the customer demographics to tailor the offers, it is important to view the individual information.
While managing the customer data internally, there should be protective measures as identity access management (IAM), which will help mitigate the risks related to data leakage and misuse. Access management protocols will help verify the users’ credentials and enact appropriate restrictions in terms of data access privileges. This approach is constructive when there are distributed teams, and the access attempts may come from various locations. With such a restricted data access management in place, Flosum points out that it will not only assure you of data protection but can give you extra mileage in terms of customer trust too.
Improving the user experience
The UI/UX components may also greatly influence the customer impression about the given brand’s security concern. As we can assume, customers tend to be attracted to more user-friendly e-commerce websites where they feel secure and convenient for them to browse through various pages. A confusing and untoward website or navigation elements will turn the users away from such pages.
It is a proven fact that modern-day consumers may not be willing to interact with the e-com sites if they find that the given instructions are not clear or if they feel uncomfortable with the data collection notifications out there. Suppose they get bombarded with many requests to accept the cookies on the page and presented with complicated and mandatory data collection forms. In that case, they may not be simply willing to give any such information. Also, if they feel that the terms and conditions related to consumer data usage are not clear, they instantly turn away.
Ensure that any such data collection or information sharing forms are made clear and straightforward not to intimidate the users. It should also be noted that a great UX design will help to enhance user safety and may help establish a better relationship between the provider and consumer.
Boosting the competence of employees
Along with taking all the cybersecurity measures while setting up and administering e-commerce websites, it is also important to emphasize educating the users to recognize the critical threats and act accordingly. All the internal users and employees needed to be given opportunities to have continuing education in cybersecurity and must be frequently updated with the security best practices to follow. Your employees should act as the frontline warriors to prevent hackers or external intruders from getting into your enterprise systems.
Cybercriminals may try to deploy many common attacks like phishing or other scam emails to their corporate email IDs list. These emails may appear legitimate to the employees who are addressed personally with their name and show very relevant business subjects. But, if they open these emails and attachments, the attack is launched. However, there are many noticeable signs of understanding about whether the emails are scams or not. So, make sure that your employees are updated with all such things to look for and avoid.
Along with these, the e-com website administrators must do the software updates from time to time as the providers are rolling these out. Such updates may consist of security enhancement and patches for existing security flaws to better safeguard your data assets. One fact to remember is that the importance of ensuring cybersecurity cannot be emphasized enough until you fall prey to an attack. So, you need to foresee such challenges and bring policies to be practiced genuinely to avoid security threats.
