E-commerce Sites Ensuring Secure Shopping Experience

With the ever-sinking economy, retail, especially online retail, is the only industry on its upward trail. The e-commerce sector has been on an ascending curve but the growth has been slow in comparison than the expected trend. But why could online retail be lagging behind the online marketeers' expectations? There is only one word answer to this, INSECURITY.

One of the biggest drawbacks of shopping with the online medium is the amount of risk involved in the money transaction process. There are occasions where one can get his identity or credit card information stolen online itself. How? This could simply be done through hackers or someone who is involved wit h the inner workings of the customer payment section of the e-commerce websites as they have open accessibility to customer account details and related databases.

What is worse in this case is that you might actually land a victim of cyber crime in a bid to save some time, fuel and money. Today, e-commerce websites are trying to carefully maintain and sustain their consumer-base through their own online security strategies, realizing customer aloofness due to the occurrence of such scams in the past. Particularly in India, more than the inaccessibility of the internet at most places, it is the 'trust' factor keeps buyers off the shopping portals.

To combat this factor, major shopping portals like Indiamart, Futurebazaar, Retailsdirect and Indiaplaza have come up with special security strategies and safer online transaction methods to protect personal information of their consumers.

Some of the valuable methods employed by these virtual stores for protecting user account information include:

- Usage of softwares which enable changing one's credit card number, name, bank account, login information, and email ID
- Protection of the customer email ID against fraud, spam, viruses, and phishing (defrauding online account and financial information) is being ensured
- Usage of online accounts like Paypal which come loaded with a bunch of features ensuring one-time entry of your credit card numbers to avoid hacking etc.
- Provision of using e-generated credit card umbers instead of actual credit card numbers on some e-commerce websites
- Most shopping portals also use secure web servers to avoid peeping third parties
SSL certification and contact details are mentioned to instill trust in the consumers' mind

Overall, the online medium is a convenient way of buying you-name-it-and-you have-it items on the Internet. But the convenience and easy access has resulted in a number of loopholes in the inter-connected system exploited by cyber criminals. Therefore, ensuring a secure online store is of utmost importance. The security of a medium can only lead to its growth and expansion even in the remotest of areas.