E-commerce Fundamentals  «Prev 

Issues in e-commerce

Many e-commerce issues are unresolved. As you can see from the issues discussed in this lesson, businesses, and even consumers, should not engage in e-commerce ignorant of the concomitant risks. Security, intellectual property rights, and payment processing must be considered carefully when planning to move a business into Internet commerce.

Top five challenges facing eCommerce retailers are:

  1. Consumers demand amazing mobile experiences and websites need to be responsive
  2. Consumers also demand seamless experiences across all channels.
  3. Legacy systems are holding retailers back.
  4. Innovation is impaired by upgrade requirements of old platforms.
  5. Current enterprise eCommerce platforms utilize poor payment models.

To make e-commerce sites more user-friendly, you usually store details such as credit card numbers in a database so that users do not have to retype this information each time they place an order. A customer account system will store this information and include all the web pages required for entering such details. As well as implementing these web pages, a site will need to take several other factors into account. First, simply placing credit card numbers, expiry dates, and other important information into a database in plain text is not ideal because it raises the possibility that this data could be stolen should the server be compromised. This could occur remotely or be perpetrated by individuals within our organization. In addition to enforcing a prohibitively restrictive access policy to such data, it can be a lot easier simply to encrypt sensitive information and retrieve it programmatically when required. One should create a security library to ease this functionality. Second, secure communications are important because you will be capturing sensitive information such as credit card details via the Web. We cannot just put a form up for people to access via HTTP and allow them to send it to us, because the information could be intercepted. Instead, the developer must implement SSL over HTTPS connections.

Payment Issues

The basic law for payment is keep it as simple as possible. Customers have spend quite amount of time to judge your online store reliability, your products/services worthiness, etc. If they still have to go through a confusing, long checkout process, what will guarantee if your customers do not go somewhere else?

Securities Issues

Security is the most common ecommerce issue. Due to increasing number of scam, fraud, and hacked websites which result in customers credential information being hacked.
Question: How does one ensure visitors that your online store is safe from all those threats?