Online shop security can be a powerful marketing tool

Published on May 16, 2012 Online shop security can be a powerful marketing tool

One of the major reasons that customers abandon shopping carts is a fear that the site is not secure and that scammers, skimmers or hackers will take control of their personal information and ransack their identity.

By addressing this potential fear you can reduce the number of abandoned shopping carts and drive additional order completion through your store.

How can you go about this? One way is to create a “Why buy from us?”, “We are a secure shop” or “Your privacy matters” page on your website (which you can then link to in a sidebar text or via a banner in the side column of your site).

What content should this page have? Consider the following:

• How is private data protected by your shopping cart software? A technology called SSL is commonly used by shopping carts to encrypt personal data like names and credit cards before it is sent across the Internet to your payment processor.  Ozcart sites come with SSL free for the first year which renews at only $89 per year (i.e. only $7.41 per month) thereafter.
• What processes does your site use to protect credit card data as it is processed? Ozcart websites redirect customers to the secure payment processor’s website to collect the actual credit card data and process it before either redirecting the customer back to the site on a successful (or failed payment), or sending a message back to the site to advise the result of the transaction.
• What can your payment processor offer as an explanation in how they keep data secure? If they don’t have plain English descriptions of this on their website, ask them. They’ll more than likely help you.
• What processes does your business have in place to protect customer’s privacy?

The answers to these questions are the things you should cover in your security/how to checkout page. When you write the page, think about who your customer is, what level of knowledge they have about security, what their fears may be and how they think.

Write to your customer – use the language they would use and not technical jargon. That’s why no one page fits everyone. You know your customers better than anyone else so it’s best you write a page like this yourself rather than subcontract it out to a third party freelancer.