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As there is significant growth in the usage of the internet, the eCommerce industry has grown a lot. As the day passes, the number of people buying the products through eCommerce platforms is tremendously increasing.   

But, nowadays the eCommerce industry is facing different security threats. As many vulnerable activities are reported in the eCommerce platforms, the store owners have to plan some effective strategies to keep the platform safe.  

Today, most of the transactions in the eCommerce industries are carried out through digital payment methods like debit cards, credit cards, net banking, and much more. So, it is the responsibility of the store owner to ensure the security of their transactions. If proper security is not provided to these transactions, then different malpractices may happen. 

Here in this article, we are discussing the 11 major eCommerce security threats and their solutions in 2020.

The Most Common Security Threats

1.Spams

In most times the emails will be an effective method to boost the sales and keep the users more active. But at the same time, it has become the most used way to create spams. It is seen that spammers send some spammy links via email or social media to harm the site.

There are also many online spammers who use the contact forms and the comment section of the blogs to add spammy links. Sometimes, these spammy links may be very harmful to the website that creates many issues in the future.

Besides the website security, it may also deplete the loading speed of the website. So that the users won’t get proper user experience and they will be left from the site.  

2. Financial Threats

Where there is a financial activity involved, there may be some financial frauds following them. Today, as most of the transactions are electronic, the mode of financial threats has also updated to electronic. 

There are financial frauds who do unauthorized transactions form the eCommerce store and grab a significant amount of money. Also, fake refunds and returns are the most common type of fraud activity reported by the store owners.

Some of these frauds orders an item from the store, use it, and then applies for the refund to get back his money. As the financial frauds are getting smarter, they try to steal the information of your customer’s credit card & rob an amount using these details.   

3. Phishing

Nowadays, phishing is a common security threat for both online buyers and actual store owners.

Here, the hackers will send an email or a text message to the customers of your online store by maintaining the look of your store or something else that makes the customer believe the message is from your website.

In most cases, these types of fake emails will be having a call to action button or some other methods to take that action provided by the hacker. When the customers provide their username and password using these actions, then the hacker can easily grab their personal data. 

4. Force Attacks

The force attacks from the hackers aim the admin panel of the online store. They try to steal the username and password of the admin panel and hack the online store.

They create special programs to set up a connection with the online store and tries all the combinations to break your password. Therefore, creating a secure password with special characters, alphabets, and, numbers is the best way to keep it safe.

5. SQL Injections

The SQL injection is a type of attack that targets the database of your website using the submission forms. 

When the database is hacked, they will insert malicious codes into the database and grab the required data from there. By inserting malware, hackers can change the appearance and content of the website. 

6. Bots

Nowadays, you can see both good and bad bots on the internet. Different search engines make use of the good bots for crawling and indexing the results. At the same time, different malicious activities are carried out using bad bots.

As bad bots will steal the content, pricing details, and other information, there are many eCommerce stores affected by them. 

7. XSS

Hackers will infect your eCommerce with malign code and targets your customers. Content security policy is the best method to protect yourself from it.

8. DDoS

The Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) targets your website and affect the sales of your store. It can make an online store to a not available situation by bringing traffic from different sources.

There are many online store owners who had become the victim of a DDoS attack. This attack will affect the store hardly and even reduce the trust of the customers in that particular business.

9. Trojan Horses

Sometimes both the customers and admins might have downloaded trojan horses in their PC. It can be said as the worst security threat of the network. Here, the attackers will make use of these programs to get valuable information from the system. 

10. MITM

The Man In The Middle attack happens when a person with malicious thought comes to a deal between two people. This middle man acquires the details that the two people were sending each other.

In case the MITM attack begins, then the middle man will send you an email that looks legitimate. Nowadays, different types of MITM attacks are seen like DNS spoofing, IP spoofing, email hijacking, and much more.

11. Cart Blocking

If you are a person who shops fro the online stores, then you may have noticed the importance of cart. Here, the hackers may add a number of products to their cart from different IP addresses.

So that it pushes the cart limit and that products will be shown out of stock for the store customers. Sometimes, it may be done by some bots whose aim will be to stop people buying products from that particular store. In some cases, the cart blocking is done by the competitors of a specific company to boost their sales.

Security Solutions For Ecommerce

Anti Virus & Anti Fraud Software

There are some financial frauds who use stolen credit and place the order. Using an anti-virus or anti-fraud software, most of these fraud transactions can be controlled. As it reduces the malicious transactions, you can run your eCommerce store efficiently.

HTTPS

Securing your online store with HTTP protocol is one of the best methods to protect from vulnerable activities. Along with protecting the sensitive information of the users, it also secures their user data.

Today, upgrading to HTTPS is considered as a method of higher ranking in the result page. Therefore, you can upgrade the ranking and keep the store secure using the HTTPS method.

Before that, you must get the SSL certification from your hosting provider. So, make sure that you are having an up to date SSL certification and HTTPS for your store.    

Keep The Servers More Secure

While beginning, the eCommerce platform comes with a default password that can be easily broken. So, changing this default password with a strong one is the primary step that you should consider. 

Always use a complex password with a mix of numbers, alphabets, and special characters. Also, change them frequently. Besides that, you are having the option to notify you when an unknown IP gets logged in. Enable this option, so that you get notified when there is an unknown login.

Security of Payment Gateway 

Storing the credit card details or any other payment-related information of the user in your database is a risky factor. Many times, it will be an open invitation for hackers. So, you should ensure the security of your payment gateway.

Even a small loophole can make a huge loss. Therefore, using a third party payment method is a good option. Nowadays, there are a lot of third party payment methods like Paypal, Wordplay, and much more. Choose any of them as per your preference and have a secure payment.    

FireWalls

Using firewall software is an efficient method to avoid many cyber threats. It will only allow trusted traffic to your website, which keeps it more secure. Cross-site scripting, SQL injections, and other cyber attacks can be avoided using the firewall software. 

SSL

With the help of Secure Socket Layer (SSL), the entire process happening at the website can be secured. It also offers you a certificate of ownership, that makes the hackers not to use the site for phishing attacks.

Educate Your Clients

Most of the security threats can be solved by educating your clients. You can ask them to set a strong username and passwords for their account. So that a third person cannot break it easily.  

Also, teach them about the risks involved in the online purchase and deliver the solutions for those risks. 

A Few Final Words

These all are the major eCommerce security threats and their solutions. While running an online store, you should be aware of the security threats that you might face in the future. 

Sometimes, you haven’t faced any security threat for your online store. But, even though some specific measures and strategies should be planned to prevent malware attacks.

In case there is a security threat for your store, then the confidence of your customers towards your store reduces. This brings a huge loss to your business. So, always perform a regular site audit and keep your store secure.   

Visual merchandising for brick-and-mortar stores is something that we all are super familiar with. With the e-commercial platform getting uber-competitive day by day, one cannot neglect the importance of visual merchandising in online shopping. Many of the principles of visual merchandising can be applied to the e-commercial platforms to have a significant impact on sales conversion.

Today, a majority of brick-and-mortar stores have their own online stores. Most companies make sure that the two platforms are interconnected.

Visual merchandising for online stores is not a herculean task to achieve. When the right strategy is adopted, it requires very little effort for the maintenance.

Get to know Online Visual Merchandising

Online Visual merchandising refers to a set of strategies devised to enhance the overall customer experience of your store. Ranging from color choice to intriguing site layout, these are designed to entice the fellow customers and encourage them to buy the products.

The E-Commercial platform has become so competitive that more and more online stores are bringing the concepts of visual merchandising into reality. It has become necessary to draw the customers into the store and maximize the sales, which is dependent on augmenting the aesthetic quality of the product. This is where visual merchandising comes into effect.

Visual merchandising is a vital marketing technique that assures brand recognition and brand loyalty. It is not just confined to vision, but also takes in all of the senses into account, be it touch, smell, or even taste.

With the Omnichannel Strategy being the most sought-after marketing strategy, there’s a growing need to differentiate between the channels.  Having limitations in utilizing these channels for your sales, your website becomes the ultimate pivot for maximizing the sales conversions. It’s therefore imperative to present your online store in an engaging way.

Significance of Online Visual Merchandising

Just like how visual merchandising is effectual for the typical brick-and-mortar stores, this works perfectly for online stores as well. Online visual merchandising can be employed to increase customer engagement, time-on-site, and sales conversion rates, which makes it an important marketing tactic to sustain in this ultra-competitive marketing environment.

This begins with making use of professional product photos to the adoption of super-effective visual elements to elevate the overall online shopping experience.

Since online shopping lacks the physical presence, it has to compensate for the missing shopper sensory inputs such as sight, smell, taste, and touch. Also, it has to be ensured that the customers are presented with the most relevant products, experiences, and choices before they move on to the next store.

Key Aspects of Online Visual Merchandising

Here are some of the important aspects of online visual merchandising:

1. Eye-catching Product Photos

Though conventional, photos are a great way to seize the shopper’s attention and lure them into buying the product.

Earlier, high-grade professional product photos and rightly-placed products achieved the desired results. 

But now, customers don’t just rely on professional photos. Instead, they look forward to seeing the customer photos of the product. People wish not to make any mistakes. Hence, they just want to make sure that other customers were happy with the purchase. It’s, therefore, necessary to incorporate the customer photos on your product page so as to win their trust. 

Adding customer photos on the product page is proved to have significantly increased the checkout.

2. Aesthetic Design

The way you present your online store is a prime factor in capturing customer attention and encouraging them to buy the product. 

The visual attractiveness of the online store, rightly placed products, clear-cut product descriptions, and images are indeed important in giving your online store an upper hand over the rest of the stores.

Consider the homepage of your online store as the shop window. This must be adequate to capture the attention of the users. Make sure that you use personalized content wherever possible.

Quality images always guide the shopper in their decision-making process. This ensures that there are minimal product returns. Also, display your product in such a way that it is visible from all the angles.

Short and precise product descriptions are a must since 90% of the customer won’t spare time to read lengthy product descriptions. Also, complex terminology has to be avoided.

When a customer visits the store, usually first impressions are made within the first 2-3 seconds. So, if they’re not happy with how the products are presented on your online store, they are more likely to hit the back button and move on to some other online store. Hence, it’s absolutely necessary to keep your store website as appealing as possible.

3. Mobile Responsiveness

Since the majority of online shoppers rely upon either mobile phones or tablets for their shopping, your online store must be mobile responsive.

 All of the product images, features and descriptions have to be delivered to the intended audience in an appropriate manner.

These shouldn’t just be confined to mobile alone, rather, creating tactics for multiple devices need to be focussed on.

4. Genuine Customer Experiences

When it comes to earning customer’s trust, putting forth genuine real-life experiences of other satisfied customers can actually serve the purpose.

Presenting User-generated content like customer photos, reviews and ratings can be utilized to convince your fellow customers and acquire their trust.

It has to be noted that, just displaying customer photos and reviews won’t get you anywhere. Put in your creativity and innovation and the result is just mind-blowing!!

How to effectively utilize Visual Merchandising for Online Stores?

Let’s have a look at various techniques to make the best use of visual merchandising to bring your online store to the forefront.

1. Practise Story-telling

Carry out telling your brand’s story which will prompt your customers into buying the product. Storytelling is an effective way to allow customers to know about a brand’s personality, values, and authenticity.

Branded storytelling is proved to have established an emotional connection between the customer and the brand. It does help the customers trust a brand and develop an everlasting relationship with it.

2. Fascinate them with Product Descriptions

Don’t underestimate the importance of product description in marketing. A short and precise description provides the customers with all the information that they need to know about the product before hitting the “Add to Cart” button. 

Ensure that you provide the clear-cut description, price, specifications like color, size, etc. so that the user can confirm that this is the product they’ve been looking for!

90% of the customers won’t spare time to read lengthy product descriptions. It is advisable to avoid complex product terminologies.

A vast majority of the customers won’t buy the product that they don’t understand.

3. Enable Browsing Enhancements

Enabling browsing enhancements like sorting products based on color or specific features allows the users to choose on what basis they wish to sort the products and view only the relevant products. 

4. Provide Product Recommendations

Product Recommendation is a prominent tool in Online Merchandising. This is a key area that is growing day by day. Fine tune your product recommendation strategies for different pages so as to create a better user experience.

The products are displayed based on user preferences, user activity, and general trends.

The product recommendations use the products or pages previously viewed by the user. For example, if the user starts searching for ladies sandals, then the subsequent pages would display ladies footwear or accessories as the recommended product. This data is used again whenever the user visits social media like Facebook, Instagram, etc.

You can personalize the products based on the data collected from the users. Now you’re aware of the products they have viewed and added to their cart. You can use this data to provide better personalization to their fellow users.

You have to ensure that the product recommendations that you provide boost your sales conversions and not throw into confusion.

Make use of cutting-edge technologies like data mining and data analytics to get this done without further struggle.

5. Offer Customized shopping experience

Personalization has become increasingly popular these days. Giving customers a personal touch can help improve your brand recognition. Personalization provides customers with relevant products and increases the probability of sales conversions.

A vast majority of online shoppers find personalized products interesting and are drawn towards brands that offer them.

Personalization is easier for online stores since there’s only a single place to sell them- online!

But this ain’t the case with retail stores where the number of places and ways in which a customer can shop varies.

6. Emphasize User-generated contents

Story-telling can be increasingly practiced using User-Generated Content (UGC).  User-generated contents like customer photos, reviews and ratings help to build customer trust. It also increases engagement and time-on-site. It can also be used as a strong social proof for your brand. You’re not marketing at your audience anymore. In fact, you’re marketing with them.

Make use of User-Generated Contents and let it speak for you!

Use these online visual merchandising strategies to take your business to the next level.

Why is understanding abandonment necessary? A whopping 69.57% is the statistics of an average global shopping cart abandonment rate, based on the 2020 forecast. If I had an e-store, knowing the numbers, I would be shattered

A mindset you have to uphold here is to understand the reason or the cause of such human behavior. A customer selects the product he is willing to purchase, and then something happens, and he retrieves from the purchase decision and abandons the cart.

So, What Is Cart Abandonment?

It is a concept used in eCommerce to describe the shoppers who add items to their online cart or even start the checkout process but leave the site before completing the purchase. Certain factors determine the reason for such behavior, i.e. excessive shipping charges that get added in the checkout process, no guest checkout options, no multiple payment options, etc. 

How To Reduce Shopping Cart Abandonment?

It’s annoying to know why thousands of visitors abandon their cart before checkout. This approach is quite common, and this is when you have to come up with techniques to reduce such behavior. 

Provide Clarity On The Additional Costs

Don’t put your customer to surprise knowing the additional charges incurred in the checkout process. Expenses such as shipping cost, delivery charges, tax charges, hidden costs, are added to your product value. Make sure no such thing occurs. 

Your customers are the asset that you have to nurture. Make sure to be transparent on all incurred costs for the product they wish to purchase. One thing to do is to display all costs upfront at the time of product selection. This indeed is a way to avoid the astound that the customer feels. The best way to diminish cart abandonment is by providing free shipping to customers. But sometimes providing free shipping does not come under the policy of the store, the last thing you can do here is to notify the customer with the total incurred cost beforehand.

Provide Guest Checkout And Social Logins

A random visitor who is asked to create an account in an eCommerce site is most likely to leave abandoning the cart. Filling out the email address validating it and providing a password will be quite annoying for a visitor who has no plans of making future purchases, where there are several options available for them.

Provide a way most easier for your visitor, and here social logins would help. Anticipating the time that would be consumed throughout the checkout process, pulls back the person from making the purchase decision. Login with your Facebook and Google are the mostly found social logins. Adapt that which you think will comfort your visitor to make a better purchase decision.

Provide A Simple And User-Friendly Checkout

A problematic and complicated checkout process is one of the primary reasons for cart abandonment. A smooth and secure checkout is a dream of every customer, which indeed will assure him come for repurchases, but when it turns the other way round, it will lose some potential customers. The elongated checkout process is, the higher the chances of cart abandonment

Keep it short and straightforward. Make sure to avoid the elements that are unnecessary and focus on the necessary information. Try to contain your checkout processes in one place. 

Provide Effortless Navigation

Navigation within the website made easy is the relief for the customers. A smooth navigation system will help in reducing cart abandonment. For several eCommerce websites, it is often found that when a user clicks on the back button after finishing a specific tab, all the information is omitted and users are asked to fill in their data again. It is bothersome to customers. Getting prospective customers going through several pages will scare them off your website until they can pay for a product. 

The thumb rule is to ensure that consumers don’t have to browse through more pages before they can buy the stuff. Similarly, the customer interface would be reasonably straightforward to identify the most critical elements they need to complete their order. 

Better Loading Speed For Websites

Does your site take more loading time? You are missing out on a massive number of potential customers due to this. We usually select the product, and in the checkout process, there will be an issue with the loading speed, and eventually, the customer will backout. Work on your checkout page and improve the speed and quality.  Find out where more time is consumed and optimize to rule out the problem in the future. Make sure to optimize the images to manage the gap between quality and speed. 

Provide A Clear Return Policy

Policies are the backbone of every eCommerce store. Policies are created, keeping in mind the purchase behavior of a customer. There are chances a shopping cart is abandoned if the customer is not satisfied with the terms and conditions. The customer might be tempted to purchase the product but is backing out due to your return policy.

Have a transparent and robust policy on returns. Provide them with enough days to refund or return the product if it has defects or if it doesn’t meet their expectations. Users should feel more relaxed when shopping that will prompt the customers to repurchases.

Provide Payment Options

It would be tragic to see a customer leaving the cart practically for not getting enough payment options because of the unavailability of the preferred payment method. People moved to digital wallets, which are often called e-wallets. Therefore it will not be enough to provide only limited payment options such as credit card and debit card. The more choices you offer your clients, the more relaxed they feel when making the order.

Provide A Convincing Image

An image should portray a brick-and-mortar feel to a person when they visit your store.  One of the biggest online shopping problems is that consumers don’t get to check out the items physically. It can lead to circumstances where consumers get an underwhelming product relative to their expectations. Make sure the image you upload is the same picture of your product. Providing different angles of the product picture will enable you to assure customers of product quality.

Create Scarcity

There are moments when a shopper needs some extra motivation to go ahead and finish his purchase. It is where the shortage can be used to build the desire to buy now.

Another tactic is to indicate how many units there are left of a product. Telling the consumer, for example, that there are only three remaining dresses in the size and design they want will push them to buy based on fear of losing out.

Another way to manipulate scarcity is to install a countdown clock. It works when you’re doing exclusive offers and flash sales. Once consumers know that they only have a few hours to get the deal, browsing around is less likely to be wasted.

Send an Update Email

Sometimes it happens that we drop something in the cart and forgets about the purchase. Here we can create an automated email system to which we can send out the email to customers who have entered their login details. We create an opportunity for the customers to complete the checkout process by providing a backlink to the checkout page with the selected product details. The automated email can be sent in a series that can benefit from bringing back the revenue that would have disappeared.

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