Do i really need SSL certificate for my e-commerce store?

Before getting into “Do I really need SSL certificate for my e-commerce store”, we should talk about “what is SSL and why it is a matter of concern”.

Planning to accept credit cards online? A merchant account is likely to be needed, and most of them will require you to be using an SSL certificate. Many web-hosting providers, including GoDaddy, have terms of services that allow you to encrypt your website with an SSL before you accept credit cards. Moreover, would you really like to risk your customers having their credit card information compromising while shopping at your website?

Most of the online store and shopping card programs, come with a built-in secure payment system, to protect customer’s information.

SSL stands for Secure Sockets Layer. It is a networking protocol designed for establishing the encrypted link between the web client and the web server over an unsecured network. As a result, it maintains the security of the information that the browser provides such as customer’s credit card details, passwords, login credentials, and etc to a web server such as an online store or online banking applications.

To create a secure connection and activate it in your web server, you need certificates for the domain, called SSL Certificate. Browsers do not accept self-signed certificates.

HTTPS stands for ‘secured hypertext transfer protocol’. It is just HTTP with SSL. Websites having HTTPS address has an SSL Certificate issued by a certificate authority and the traffic on that website is authenticated and encrypted with this Protocol.

The need for the Certificate

• Maintains high encryption levels of up to 256- bit to protect user’s sensitive information from phishing scams and attacks.
• Protects the website from attacks, reduces the risk of hacking, eavesdropping, and man-in-the-middle attacks.
• It establishes safe shopping experiences for the customers, it is necessary for the websites accepting the payments.
• Increases your brand reputation by validating your business from a trusted certificate authority (TCA).
• Users trust the website with the ‘secured connection ‘ sign, which increases organizations’ profit.
• It provides authentication of a website.
• It provides better search engine ranking to the secured website as compared to unsecured websites as users can’t trust them.
• HTTPS site with green padlock and company or organization name increases the credibility and trust of a website and company.

How this Certificate works

1. So when a browser requests to communicate with an SSL secured website (or webserver). The browser requests the webserver to identify itself.
2. The web server sends a copy of its Certificate of the browser.
3. The browser will check whether the server trusts this Certificate or not. If so, then it sends the message to the server.
4. In addition, The web server sends back a digitally signed acknowledgment to the browser to start an SSL secured encrypted session.
5. The browser and the web server will share the authenticated data.

In this way, this Certificate establishes a secured connection between the web client and the webserver.

Certificate providers

Some Certificate providers are:

1. Comodo,  Click – HERE
2. GeoTrust, Click – HERE
3. Symantec, Click – HERE
4. RapidSSL, Click – HERE
5. Thawte, Click – HERE

In short, SSL is becoming the cornerstone of our safe internet developed by Netscape, shielding your sensitive information as it is moving through computer networks across the world.

The latest version of SSL, such as SSL 3.0, and above, is called TLS (Transport Layer Security). It is simply the latest version of SSL. Most of the people still say SSL instead of TLS, that’s why the majority of companies like- Comodo, GeoTrust, Thawte are not changing their product names from SSL certificate to TLS certificate. TLS version 1.0 actually starting developing as SSL version 3.1, but the protocol name was changed before release to suggest it was no longer associated with Netscape, the SSL and TLS are used as in interchange.

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