How GREED Can Save Your eCommerce Site’s Reputation
By Josh George, technical lead
So, you’ve decided you want to implement, upgrade, or move to a new eCommerce platform—one that reflects your company’s brand, authority, and overall growth plan. That’s great! With B2C eCommerce sales predicted to reach more than one trillion dollars in 2016 (and skyrocket to 12.4 percent of all global retail sales by 2019), it’s no surprise you’re focusing on eCommerce.
At the same time, it seems like every day reports surface about the latest e-tailer to fall victim to a data breach, fraud, or site crash that affects not only the retailer’s reputation but also its bottom line.
How do you protect your eCommerce business from becoming the next victim of consumer fear or an avoidable crisis?
One word: GREED.
Well, OK…one acronym.
What does GREED stand for?
Get a well-known, reputable eCommerce platform
Realize you must keep watch for new security issues
Engage in active identification of security loopholes
Enforce best practices when updating your storefront
Deploy your storefront properly
Let’s take a look at each segment in more detail.
Get a Well-Known, Reputable eCommerce Platform
Depending on the size and needs of your business, you can choose from a variety of different platforms. What’s important is that the platform is known for having a commitment to security, an uncomplicated user interface, simple page editor, and easy integration with payment systems, just to name a few.
A few popular eCommerce platforms are:
Small-sized businesses: Magento, Shopify
Medium-to-large sized businesses: Demandware, Oracle ATG
Large-sized businesses: SAP Hybris, IBM WebSphere
What’s great about these options is they have internal teams or a community of outside developers dedicated to continuously improving and updating the platform. This ensures your eCommerce platform is always optimized for your business and customers.
Realize You Must Keep Watch for New Security Issues
Many platforms are good about letting you know when updates will become available for new security threats. That being said, it’s still important to stay proactive about potential attacks on the horizon. Security issues can easily surface that haven’t been patched yet, so you’ll want to ensure your development team can create a solution to patch any security holes.
Engage in Active Identification of Security Loopholes
As a precaution, it’s always a good idea to stay informed on the latest security news and alerts that could affect your eCommerce shop. Here are two options to keep you in the loop about the website security industry:
- Read and subscribe to popular website security blogs such as F-Secure, Jeremiah Grossman, and Forbes Firewall
- Create Google Alerts for topics such as website security, eCommerce security, and other similar phrases
Enforce Best Practices When Updating Your Storefront
You can easily create security vulnerabilities during development if you engage in poor development practices when updating your storefront. You can put your business and customers at serious risk, so it’s important to have at least one person familiar with development best practices review any modifications to your storefront.
Deploy Your Storefront Properly
Once you deploy all relevant changes to your storefront, make sure a team of people QAs the storefront to confirm no negative effects resulted from the updates. Once all new changes are approved, you can then push them live.
GREED Is Your Friend in eCommerce
So in the end, it’s important to know that attackers are always looking for easy targets. If your eCommerce platform is updated to the latest version and was implemented using development best practices, then most attackers will just move on to easier targets. Just remember that when it comes to eCommerce, it’s OK to be GREEDy.
Josh George is a technical lead engineer on the LYONSCG implementation team and has been developing Demandware storefronts since 2012. Josh is a certified Demandware developer and architect with a passion for learning about digital marketing.
