With the growth of e-commerce, new marketing methods have emerged. Social media has become an important part of attracting customers and building your brand. It serves as a great way of funneling customers to your website or platform. Commerce can also be done directly on social media platforms, which we’ll focus on.
The way in which you conduct transactions is an important part of the customer experience. It’s also a process in which both your business and the customers are the most vulnerable to cyber-attacks and fraud.
This article explores the importance of being a trustworthy business for your customers and how to secure your payments.
Importance of customer trust
In any business, building a relationship with your customers is essential. The process of attracting and keeping customers doesn’t only happen through marketing and content. Having a notoriously reliable and secure platform can also be a way of increasing your audience.
Let’s say a customer has to choose between your business and a competitor that has suffered breaches in the past that led to customers being exposed to fraud and identity theft. Your commitment to cybersecurity then gives you a competitive edge.
This leads to increased customer trust and the potential to build long-term relationships with customers. On the other hand, a lack of confidence in payment security could lead to abandoned carts, negative reviews, or lost sales.
Social media commerce platforms are a mix of user-generated content and brand promotions, sometimes blurring the lines of credibility. Each method in which you’ll improve the people’s confidence in your brand will be worthwhile.
Why secure payments matter
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During the payment process, the customer is the most vulnerable. They leave their financial and personal info to make a purchase, allowing the hackers to steal them. Bad actors can leverage unencrypted traffic or weak authentication to obtain this data.
If a user loses their financial data while using your platform, you can be eligible for a lawsuit. Depending on your location and the location of the customer, you can be held liable under numerous data protection laws and regulations.
For example, if you were looking to sell a product to a customer in the EU, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) could be applied. Similarly, you might be held liable under CCPA, PIPEDA, or any other regional regulation.
However, besides being sued, you can also lose customers and reputation if you suffer from a data breach multiple times. Regardless of how good your products are, many people would prefer safety over being at risk of having their credentials and PII stolen.
Best practices for secure payments
There are many practices for securing payments, but the ones mentioned below can make the most significant difference. You’ll need to ensure that your customers are protected throughout their journey.
Some practices may incur costs, but they are far less than the potential expenses of security breaches.. Learn more about the cost benefits of investing in cybersecurity here
1. Multi-factor authentication
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Authentication is one of the most important parts of overall security. Commonly, people only have to enter their password and email or username to sign in their profile. However, this makes the platform susceptible to numerous cybersecurity threats.
For example, a hacker can steal a user’s platform through phishing, brute force attacks, or social engineering. Multi-factor authentication includes multiple ways of verifying identity, such as:
- Biometrics,
- One-time tokens,
- Geolocation authentication.
So, even if a bad actor steals someone’s credentials, they won’t be able to access the account without having access to their phone. Biometrics includes authenticating the user by face recognition or fingerprint scan.
For your social media commerce platform, you can also implement multi-factor authentication during the payment process, as well as when the users are accessing their accounts. Multi-factor authentication is essential for employees as well.
If someone gets their hands on an employee’s account, they can escalate their privileges and harm users in other ways.
2. Fraud prevention software
One of the modern ways of customer protection is through fraud prevention software. It provides the platform with real-time protection and monitoring of transactions. These tools can scan thousands of transactions, automatically flagging ones that are considered suspicious.
Furthermore, having this software at your disposal can also serve as a great way of proving your reliability to customers. Share engaging posts about how your systems monitor suspicious activity, allowing your customers to easily understand how sophisticated your security is.
These tools also help with friendly fraud prevention. This type of fraud can be intentional or unintentional, and it occurs when a cardholder disputes a purchase even if the card wasn’t stolen.
With the latest breakthroughs in artificial intelligence and machine learning, fraud prevention software became even more helpful, as it has better capabilities of recognizing malicious traffic and transactions.
3. Strong password policies
While MFA provides protection against numerous cyber threats, it’s still essential that your employees and customers have strong passwords. You’ll ensure that your employees and customers won’t be susceptible to brute force attacks.
Strong passwords refer to passwords that have 8 or more characters and are a combination of upper and lowercase letters, symbols, and numbers. Furthermore, passwords shouldn’t consist of common words. They also shouldn’t include names, dates, or anything that could be found about you on the internet.
Another authentication step that can be crucial for security is implementing expiring passwords. This way, your customers and employees will have to update their passwords periodically, ensuring maximum security against problems like leaked passwords.
4. Secure payment gateways
Your social media commerce business likely relies on third-party payment gateways to fulfill transactions. They serve as a bridge between a customer’s payment and the business’s financial institution.
You should always use reputable and popular payment gateways, such as Stripe or PayPal, rather than less-known options. This is because Stripe and PayPal have good customer support, as well as years of good reputation and experience.
Payment gateways ensure that the user’s financial data is protected at all costs. You should explore secure payment gateway options that have advanced encryption that ensures data security while in transit.
Furthermore, an essential feature of payment gateways is that they’re available at all times. Transaction failures due to the unavailability of the system can lead to abandoned sales and carts. On the other hand, unavailability can also be a sign of unreliability.
A bonus would include using secure payment gateways that have integrated fraud detection tools so that you don’t have to purchase additional fraud prevention software.
It’s important to note that secure payment gateways can’t ensure protection against all threats. If someone makes a purchase with a stolen account, there’s a high likelihood that the transaction will be successful unless the purchase is incredibly high or suspicious in other ways.
On the other hand, secure payment getaways protect against cyber threats such as spoofing and others.
5. PCI Compliance
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The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) is a globally recognized framework designed to protect cardholders and their data. Compliance with PCI DSS standards is a must for any business that processes, stores or transmits credit card data.
To ensure compliance with this standard, you must have a secure network, encrypt financial data at rest and in transit, and regularly monitor your systems. Compliance with this standard serves as a great guide for overall network security, and it can help you avoid hefty fines.
Displaying PCI-compliance badges on your website or checkout page can significantly boost customer trust. PCI DSS compliance has four different levels, depending on your monthly traffic and transactions.
Larger social media commerce platforms might need to hire third-party auditors in order to ensure PCI compliance.
6. SSL protocols for websites
If you decide to funnel your customers from your social media commerce platform to your website, you need to ensure their safety there as well. SSL certificate is displayed in the top left corner of a website browser, and it ensures that the traffic between the client and the server is encrypted.
It’s a significant show of security. In case someone replicates your platform in order to conduct phishing, the lack of the SSL certificate will allow the victim to recognize that they aren’t at the right place.
SSL protocol also protects against man-in-the-middle attacks, and it can help you with SEO. Search engines prefer websites that have SSL protocol activated.
7. Employee training
Regardless of the industry of your business, it’s essential that your employees have basic knowledge of cybersecurity. This includes understanding how to create strong passwords, and to know how to set-up additional authentication measures like MFA.
A step beyond this is knowing how to recognize common threats on the internet, such as:
- Not to share credentials,
- Recognizing phishing attempts,
- Recognizing which websites they shouldn’t visit,
- Handling payment data,
- Staying on top of fraud trends.
Your employees don’t need to have a degree in IT to know the basics of cybersecurity. Furthermore, you can’t ask employees in marketing and SEO to know advanced cybersecurity principles.
However, you should organize workshops and training courses to understand the previously mentioned cyber threats. A security-conscious workforce not only prevents breaches but also projects professionalism to your customers.
Many security breaches occur because of human mistakes, and employee training can protect them, as well as customers. Depending on whether your business is remote or not, you should also encourage your employees to implement anti-virus software on their computers.
If your business is operating from an office, avoid bring-your-own-device policies and instead encourage the use of company computers that have the necessary protection in terms of anti-virus, firewalls, and network filters.
8. Storing customer data (Or not)
The way in which you handle customer payment data is quite important for overall security. You need to have clear lines on what data you should collect and what you shouldn’t collect. This ensures compliance and increased security.
If you must retain sensitive information, use robust encryption methods, such as AES-256, to protect it. On the other hand, try to minimize data collection and to store it only for the duration that’s necessary for the transaction to be completed.
Collecting and storing the personal data of the customers is also a double-edged sword. On one hand, you can leverage user data in order to create better social media marketing campaigns, and to target customers better.
However, you should have data regulations in mind when storing and using customer data. In terms of financial data, you should also consider outsourcing. Instead of storing data on your own servers, you can use servers of the previously mentioned payment processors.
9. Payment tokenization
Tokenization is a security method that replaces sensitive payment data with a token instead. Instead of user transmitting their personal data, they send us a token that’s meaningless to anyone that might be intercepting the traffic.
However, the right party will be able to decrypt the token using a unique cryptographic key. Tokenization helps businesses meet PCI compliance standards, as it minimizes the scope of sensitive data handling.
The previous two points alone correspond with some of the other great practices discussed throughout the article. Furthermore, tokens enhance customer experience, as checkouts can be done with a single click, without any trade-offs in terms of security.
The problem is that there can be many customers who haven’t used this method in the past, making the adoption of this practice a bit challenging.
Secure payments are essential for online businesses
Cyber threats are always going to be present, regardless of your industry. However, there are numerous ways in which you can protect your business. Even doing the bare minimum can significantly help you with protecting your customers.
Consult with cybersecurity professionals in order to understand which aspects of your social media commerce platform need cybersecurity measures. The best way to ensure security is through a combination of traditional and innovative practices.
Maintaining high-security standards protects your business and customers from fraud and is essential for building a good reputation and trust with your audience.
