Starting an online business and creating an e-commerce site can be a fun and exciting challenge. After all, the market is growing and if you do it right, early retirement can be on the horizon.

But one thing that many new entrepreneurs overlook, or perhaps even forget, is the security of their e-commerce site.

Fortunately, there are many simple preventative measures you can take to secure your website. You don’t have to be a computer genius to implement them.

In this article, we’ll look at the steps you can take to ensure your website is safe from outside threats and avoids leaking user data or causing other damage to your business.

What is e-commerce security?
Security is probably the most important feature of an e-commerce site, or at least it should be. Without proper security, online business owners put themselves, their brand and their customers at risk of fraud or identity theft. Not to mention credit card data leaks that can put a dent in your accounts and cause significant losses to your business.

Don’t think your business is safe just because it’s small at the moment. In reality, small businesses are targeted more often than large ones. Cybercriminals expect little to no security on small business e-commerce sites.

And they are not wrong. Small e-commerce sites are under constant threat. Data from Imperva, a Web security company, indicates that 29 percent – nearly a third – of a Web site’s traffic is bots trying to harm it.

In addition to actual and monetary fraud, security or data breaches damage your brand reputation. If you don’t spend money on an unsecured website, why do you want your customers to feel safe spending money with you?

And once a breach occurs, you’ll have a hard time getting your customers to come back, let alone attract new ones.

So e-commerce security is about making your business and your customers feel safe.

Security Tips for E-Commerce Sites
Knowing the most common types of security threats to your website, you may be wondering what more you can do to protect your site, your users and yourself. So we’ve put together a list of tips to help you secure the e-commerce site you run.

Choose a secure web host and e-commerce platform
There are many ecommerce solutions to meet your platform needs, but you need both a secure platform and a web host for optimal protection. Most e-commerce site builders have security measures built in. But not all platforms and hosts are the same, or even equal.

The best solution is to shop around for hosting and platform providers to find what works best for you, your business and your customers. Find a host and platform combination that offers comprehensive protection against the most common threats, such as malware and SQL injections.

Perform regular SQL checks
SQL injections can be performed in any user input form on your website, so regularly checking for these types of vulnerabilities is paramount to the safety and security of your website.

Depending on the platform you choose to use, there are several software programs that can help you monitor and protect your website from these injections. There are also free website scanners that perform the same tasks, but be sure to read reviews and only download software from trusted providers.

Set the scanner you choose to perform daily security checks on your website. That way, if there are any vulnerabilities, they can be found and secured before anyone takes advantage of them.

Leave the payment and data processing to the experts
The best way not to lose customer data is not to have any! Don’t collect or store any of your customers’ private data on your website unless absolutely necessary.

For payments, use an encrypted third-party payment tunnel to process payments – this is standard procedure for e-commerce sites. The most popular payment gateways are completely secure and are not known to leak sensitive user data.

Choose a payment platform that is compatible with your web host and e-commerce platform. You want something that offers the best fraud prevention and identity theft protection in the industry.

Keep your website updated and patched
As hackers find vulnerabilities, application developers find ways to fix them. New website software updates are released all the time, and they often include critical security patches.

Therefore, you should pay close attention to updates when they are introduced. If your updates are not automatic, you should be very careful to do them manually. But it’s a good idea to enable automatic updates, not only for your website but for your entire computer.

Watch what you download and embed
Being able to download and integrate plugins, tools, applications and more directly into your website is great! But always be aware of what you’re downloading and using. Some hackers use these add-ons to plant malicious protocols on your website.

Sometimes, it’s not even intentional. Various plugins may not be fully optimized for your software and leave your website vulnerable to attack.

The same security measures you take for your website can usually be used to protect your entire computer. Be sure to use trusted protection for professional and business use.

Back up your website data regularly
Backing up your e-commerce site won’t prevent security threats you may face, but it will help minimize or reduce the damage done. In reality, it is a strategy to protect information from being lost, corrupted or taken hostage.

It is a good business practice to take the time to back up your website as often as possible. Every time you make an update, back up the website. At a minimum, you should back up the website every three days, but it is recommended that you back it up once a day.

You can, of course, set up automatic backups so that you don’t have to manually start the process. Most website builders and hosting companies offer website backups as a built-in feature – make sure you choose the platform that can guarantee this.

Get and use a website application firewall
A website application firewall, or WAF, will help you take your e-commerce site security to the next level. It will protect your site from XSS, SQL injections and forgery requests.

It should also protect your website from any hacking attempts, including brute force attempts. Finally, it should help reduce the risk of suffering a DoS or DDoS attack.

There are several major web application firewall vendors. Find one that meets your needs and budget and is trusted by the e-commerce business community.