General questions
eCommerce websites are online portals (more commonly referred to as ‘online stores’) that facilitate online transactions of goods and services through means of the transfer of funds over the Internet. With a single website, anything and everything that a transaction needs, can be executed online.
There are different e-Commerce websites for every field. The most common type is retail selling, but there are many others too, like auction websites, business-to-business services, music portals, consultancy websites and finance management websites.
SSL CERTIFICATES
Lately, we’ve been getting more requests from our clients to set up an SSL certificate on their website. An SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) cert is used to encrypt the web traffic between the web server where your website is hosted and your visitors’ browsers.
When you visit a website, if the web address starts with http://, all the information that your browser sends to the web server and receives is in open text. So for instance, if you log into your WordPress admin panel, your user id and password are transmitted across the internet in clear text that anyone could read. So it’s entirely possible that someone who is watching the web traffic to your website could grab your user id and password as it was sent.
But if you have set up an SSL cert correctly on your web server, the URL becomes https:// (the “s” for “secure”), and all data transmitted back and forth is encrypted. This is especially important if you’re collecting any private data on your website like credit card information. I actually just visited someone’s website the other day that was not secure, Yikes. I backed out and went somewhere else.
Current banking standards require that all credit card transactions are done on a secure website.
Many websites are informational and don’t actually sell things online. So why would you want to set up an SSL certificate? There is a little bit of effort to get it set up, and it can cost you a couple hundred rands for the cert plus your web support person’s time if you don’t do it yourself. You probably have a few compelling reasons to go ahead and get it set up anyway.
As mentioned before, it’s remotely possible that someone could sniff your user id and password and gain access to your content management system. If you haven’t changed the login alias, it’s actually pretty easy to find your login id on WordPress. So if I have that information, now all I’d need is your password (if I were a hacker looking to break in).
Secondly, Google is telling us that setting up SSL on your website is important, and it’s actually a ranking factor. They’ve backed away from all the “usual” SEO factors like links, and so on. But they are telling us we need three things:
- A mobile-responsive site
- A fast website (small graphics)
- A secure website
They want peoples’ experiences to be secure.
Finally, I personally believe that people are looking for the green padlock in the web browser. It’s a small, subtle sign of trust. This seems to ring true for some of my clients who are getting pushback from their clients because they don’t want to schedule online appointments or interact on the website without it. This is smart. So we’re getting more requests to set it up for our clients.