Small business often underestimate the importance of a website. When they do get a website, it's often created by a friend or inexperienced developer - and that can have disastrous consequences.
A website is one of the best ways for a small business to find new customers. But this will only happen if the website is well designed and necessary security measures are in place.
What is SSL and why should you care?
SSL stands for Secure Sockets Layer and is an encryption standard that is commonly used to encrypt and secure information that is exchanged over the internet..
In this day and age, people often take their laptop on the road and use wireless hot spots to surf. These wireless hot spots should be locked down and encrypted, but are often not and this makes it easy for a hacker to intercept communications. Should a customer be connected to the internet via a wireless hot spot, any details they enter into your website could potentially be captured by a hacker - and that may include personal information including their name, address and credit card details. This is not only bad for your customer, it's also bad for the reputation of your business.
SSL stops that from that happening by encrypting the data that passes from your customer's computer to your website. Even if the data is intercepted by a hacker, it will be completely unreadable.
Where should encryption begin?
In my opinion, SSL encryption should start as soon as customers enter your online store. It doesn't cost you anything extra to let them shop behind encryption.
The store is where it starts. People will go and select the products they like and add them to their shopping cart. Then they will click "checkout" if you don't encrypt the entire store then this is where it should begin. In the checkout(this is usually a step process) they will either login if they are a returning customer or input there information and possibly create a user name and password as step one. Step two will be credit card information and verification this is where the encryption is most critical.
This checkout process doesn't have to be created from scratch there are online services that can help.
Authorize.net is one of the services.(author of this article is not in anyway related to or receives revenue from authorize.net)