How Safe is Ecommerce?
A Home Business Article Contributed by Alina Sandor
Ecommerce is Booming
In the second quarter of 2004 retail ecommerce sales were a booming $15.7 billion, which is up 23.4 percent from the last quarter, and total retail sales for the second quarter of 2004 were estimated at $919.0 billion.
There is no doubt that ecommerce now a major way for consumer's to buy. More and more people are finding that shopping on the Internet to be more convenient than the brick and mortar stores. And why not? You don't even have to leave the comfort of your home.
Why Some Ecommerce Sites are Loosing
Though many people look at ecommerce sites, they don't buy on ecommerce sites, even after putting a purchase into a site's cart. Why? Because many people are still concerned by the safety of transactions on sites. This is creating enormous losses for ecommerce sites. In fact, NetIQ cites DataMonitor statistics estimate unfinished ecommerce transactions could grow to $63 billion in losses in this year alone. That is a huge hit to ecommerce site's profits.
Safety is a big issue with online shoppers. In fact, a recent survey found that thirty-one percent of respondents said "good security policies" would be the biggest factor in their returning to an ecommerce store.
How to Feel Safe with a Ecommerce Site
One of the ways the government has stepped up to make consumers feel more safe at ecommerce sites to start the federal Electronic Signatures Act in 2000. This act established national standards for determining the circumstances under which contracts and notifications in electronic form are legally valid.
Legal standards were also specified regarding the use of an electronic signature which is an electronic sound, symbol, or process, attached to or logically associated with a contract and executed by a person with the intent to sign the record, such as a credit card transaction. The act made electronic signatures as legal as paper signatures, allowing contracts such as those for an online purchase, to be signed on line.
This made it easier to handle ecommerce transactions and made customers feel more secure.
When shopping on a site always make sure that the ecommerce site has security standards for your transactions such as encrypting your credit card information as well as personal information. The site should always offer you some kind of information on the security of your ecommerce transactions.
Many online ecommerce transactions are now protected by what's called SSL, or Secure Sockets Layer which provides the customer with privacy protection by encrypting the channel of communication between the store and the consumer. SSL uses a mathematical formula, putting the information exchange of a transaction into a complex code. Even if a credit card number were intercepted, your data would be too difficult to read for the average crook.
Many Internet vendors, such as IBM, have also agreed to create a single Internet secure transaction protocol. They plan to unite the Internet's two different secure transaction protocols, Secure Hypertext Transfer Protocol (S-HTTP) and Netscape's SSL. This will make transactions twice as secure for customers.
