The Shopping Cart Junkie

So you’ve visited the 123 eCart site, signed up for an online store, built your catalog and now have 1 cool store ready to launch on an unsuspecting world.

Now what?

Well…you’ll need to get shoppers into your store. For that to happen, they’ll need to find you.

“Easy enough” you say. ” I’ll submit the site to the search engines”.

You submit, and you wait. You check your logs every day (sometimes every hour) to see if anyone has visited, but very few people have set foot on the premises.

The problem, most likely, is that your site is listed in the search engines, but is not showing up very high in the results returned.

To remedy this, an entire industry - the search engine optimization industry - has come into existence. The professionals in this industry are called SEO Consultants. They can charge a great deal of money, or be extremely reasonable. If you have the money, finding an SEO can be a great investment.

What if you don’t have the money? Well - there’s a wealth of information out there regarding how to optimize your own website. A little time on Google can get you up to speed rather quickly.

One issue that ecommerce store owners often encounter is that their shopping cart software  isn’t flexible enought to allow them to optimize their site correctly.

If you are a 123 eCart store owner, you’ll find the opposite to be true.

123 eCart allows you to insert your own meta tags on every category and product page, and builds the name of the product or category right into the page URL so as to make it easier for search engines to find specific products on your site.

With a little work and the proper tools - like those included in your 123 eCart Storefront - You should be quite successful.

Let’s take a look at security - what is it?

As it relates to your online store, it’s simply this:

You have a website which collects sensitive data from customers. You have a duty to keep that data from falling into the wrong hands. Data like credit card numbers, personal info, etc. - may all be used by malicious characters to hurt your customers. If this happens, you will likely lose your customers, your business, your reputation, and maybe even held liable by the credit card companies.

So, where do we start.

Surely, ensuring that your site is hosted in a secure environment is important. There are thousands of potential vulnerabilities in web software which must be looked at… and we will.

But first, let’s address the biggest security vulnerability- YOU!

Believe it or not, the weakest link in this whole chain is usually the site owner and/ or their employees.

Luckily, implementing a few good practices will close this vulnerability tight as a drum.

Most shopping carts, whether installed on your own website, or hosted web stores, have an administrative area which you log into to configure the cart and retrieve orders. This area is usually password protected. If a bad guy were to discover your password, he could simply waltz right into your admin area and grab your clients data.

As fundamental as this may seem, selecting a good password is a big step towards securing your site and your business.

When selecting a password, avoid using names or dictionary words. Hackers often employ what is called a Brute Force Dictionary attack where they have a program attempt every word in the dictionary as well as common names.

The best password is a mixture of letters and numbers. To make it even better, use a mixture of uppercase and lowercase letters.

Once you have a good password, it’s important to safeguard it.

When logging into your storefront, use a secure login page. This is at an address which begins with https:// instead of http://

Take a look at your home or office network as well. Are you using cable to connect to the Internet? If so, anyone on your cable network can intercept your password if you are not sending it over a secure page. What about your wireless router? Is it secured? It better be.

Finally, change your password often. This makes it exponentially more difficult for a hacker to compromise your account.

Security is a big issue, and an important one.

As an online merchant, you should be particularly concerned with this topic. Accepting credit card information online confers a responsibility to handle that data with care. Nothing could be more embarrassing than explaining to your customers that their credit card number may have been compromised.

For a web store operator, there are quite a few areas to explore when it comes to security.

Over the next few weeks, we will be doing a series of articles, on The Shopping Cart Junkie, concerning shopping cart security.

Stay tuned…