Why are EV SSL Certificates Important for E-commerce Startup Businesses?
At present, a lot of businesses are shifting their base from online brick and mortar stores to offline e-commerce stores.
With the rise of e-commerce, the online platform is getting more popular than ever before.
In fact, according to statistics, In 2019, global retail sales through e-commerce is slated to touch $3535 billion in revenue. And it will continue to expand as the years go by. The e-commerce companies are also growing in number.
Apart from established players like Amazon, Alibaba, and Flipkart, a lot of fringe operators are sprouting up. The competition is getting intense, and everyone is fighting for a piece of the market share pie.
So how can you stand out amidst the crowd? Getting an EV SSL certificates for your e-commerce website will do just that for you.
Extended Validation (EV) SSL certificates are a symbol of security and integrity, and you stand to gain a lot, including your customers’ trust, by using it.
What benefits will it provide?
There are many benefits to acquiring an EV SSL certificate.
Let’s find out:
Boosts SEO
In 2014, Google announced that it would be using SSL as a search ranking signal. Which means, if your website has got an EV SSL certificate, it is going to show up earlier in Google searches. Studies estimate that visibility may increase by 5% in such cases.
You have just started up your e-commerce site. Not a lot of people know about you. It is a golden opportunity for you to reach more people and market yourself. The security of your website is a bonus.
With a lot of cut-throat competition for visibility and market space, even a 5% visibility boost may work wonders for you. With improved visibility, your revenue may well be positively impacted, spurring your growth.
- Build Trust
You have just started a new e-commerce firm. You don’t have a loyal customer base who can vouch for you. A minimal number of people know about you, and you don’t have a market reputation that you can build on.
But you need to make inroads into the market and grab a share. You need business to sustain, and for that, you need to build trust among customers.
An EV SSL certificate gives you just that. It characterizes your website in a positive light and is a representation of your rectitude and trustworthiness.
When you incorporate an EV SSL certificate, your website will display the green address bar, which is a beacon of trust. It verifies that your business is legitimate, by showing your company name and country of origin next to the URL in the address bar.
Although you need right products and excellent service to reach the zenith of success, an EV SSL certificate can encourage prospective customers at the outset to at least surf your website, simply because it’s a proof of legitimacy.
- Drives Up Sales
When people invest their time and money, they want value in return. A new e-commerce site will probably be overlooked in most instances if there isn’t a great anchoring to draw attention to.
There are plenty of fake e-commerce websites doing the rounds on the internet. The number of people who have fallen prey to such scams is also increasing. Therefore, you need a symbol of trust as your anchor.
You need an indicator to prove that you aren’t out to scam your customers and that you’re here to do authorized business.
And that anchoring can be EV SSL certificates. Apart from building trust and SEO, it has been seen that an EV SSL certificate also drives up sales and revenue.
Speaking about the importance of EV SSL certificate to boost sales, Grace Wong, CEO of Homplify said that, ‘People have mentioned to us that they spotted the https and site seal, giving them the confidence and ease to continue shopping on our website.’
That’s the kind of impact an EV SSL certificate concerning exuding reliability and increasing revenue.
- Prevents Phishing Attacks
In 2014, The Home Depot, the largest home improvement retailer in the USA, discovered that more than 50 million credit card and debit card details had been stolen by cyber-criminals, resulting in nearly 53 million leaked customer email addresses.
Later studies found that the compromise had been made in the form of phishing attacks via email addresses. The customers were warned, but by that time, the damage was done.
Had they used an EV SSL certificate, the attack would have been almost impossible. Because once the certificate is obtained, the details, names, and locations of the company are displayed on a green bar at the top of the website.
It makes it very hard for cyber-criminals to replicate this, thereby rendering the attempt to spoof a website quite useless.
- Counters DoS Attacks
In a DOS (Denial-of-Service) attack, the e-commerce website is flooded with unusually high traffic that can bring it to a standstill. Massive traffic may even cause the server to crash.
A DOS targets the banking and payment gateways linked to the e-commerce website, which are hosted on their servers. If left unchecked, these attacks may run riot, and cause identity theft and illegal transactions, which may lead to purchases using different identities.
An EV SSL certificate can provide you with the perfect counter to DOS attacks and keep your website safe and secure.
- Improves Auditability
With the advent of digitalization, regulatory bodies such as HIPAA and PCI DSS, among many others, have laid down strict rules to be followed by all industries using customer data, including e-commerce companies. These rules and standards are intended as a safeguard against potential identity theft.
Adherence to established high standards of regulation is now mandatory for compliance.
And to ensure that EV SSL certificate is one of the best ways since it provides excellent compliance against all the standards that are needed to be upheld by most regulatory bodies.
Winding Up
Instances of a data security breach in the e-commerce industry are increasing. In 2014, US retail giant Target was robbed of more than 40 million credit and debit card details of customers.
A massive cyber-attack on e-commerce giant eBay in February 2014 nearly brought it down to its knees, severely impacting its reputation.
If established retail and e-commerce brands like these may be affected, as an e-commerce start-up, one can never afford to get complacent.
In such a scenario, the best of securities in the form of an EV SSL certificate is a must-have for them.