Forming and rolling out an online business can open you up to security issues that are different from those faced by the traditional storefront owner. The most significant security risk for an online business is the fact that it is dealing with a faceless customer and your customers have the same fears when it comes to using credit cards. This scenario creates a fertile ground for cyber criminals. The online business owner must consider measures to protect his or her enterprise as well as convey a message of trust to the customer. Here are some points to consider when studying the security necessary for your online business:

Safeguards against fraudulent credit card activity must be top priority in your online business security plan. Your merchant services provider should check for billing address, validate the card number, and not allow duplicate sales. However, in credit card fraud, the criminal usually has the billing address of the stolen credit card number. A good merchant services provider will detect other suspicious activity. In fact, credit card companies and merchant services providers have checklists of how to spot potential fraudulent activity that are alerted on events like a new customer, multiple sales of the same item occurring one after the other, and shipments to foreign addresses. Some companies that do online business have had such problems in the past that they actually call the credit card company to verify the card and then perform an additional step of calling the customer. The only problem with the manual verification process is that it can slow down sales but it reduces your risk of someone running a fraudulent credit card through your online business.

Make sure your online business has a regular backup plan. The very life of your online business depends on the availability of your website and product information used to feed your shopping cart scripts. You should have at least one copy of your website on an offline server (such as a PC) and another copy of your website on removable media stored at an alternate location. Remember that backups are never important until your online business has come to a screeching halt due to unavailability of your site or its data.

Sending a message of trust to your customers is very important. Customers will not pull out a credit card to pay for a product or service on your online business site unless you convince them your site is trustworthy. And then again, there are customers who will not use a credit card on the internet no matter what. So, you need to provide more than one payment option. You can accept Paypal, credit cards, and checks. A credit card merchant service provider will give you a web interface so that you can take credit card information directly from a customer over the phone and get authorization right there. Follow good design principles for your online business website so that it does not have a scam artist “look and feel” to it. Make sure your phone number is prominently displayed so that you can be called in the event there are any problems. Customer trust in your online business is something you earn.

Use good password protection on all of your online business activities. It is quite common to have multiple websites you need to go to in order to conduct an online business enterprise. To begin with, you have the control panel password for your web hosting account (unless you have your e-commerce site on dedicated servers), a password to your merchant services account, and one to your product database. It is tempting for the online business owner to set up one password and use it for all the sites. But all it takes is the compromise of that one password and a malicious person has access to your entire enterprise. Create a unique password for each site related to your online business. Keep those passwords in a password file that you can store on removable media and lock away.

A good online business security program starts by making an assessment of all the security risks it is vulnerable to, prioritizing the impact of those risks, and implementing safeguards in order to protect against those risks. Take the time to do this assessment and implement the measures. It will save you many problems later.