 Ecommerce Woes
Did you try to buy something online in the past week (between September 16 and September 22, 2004), have to wait what seemed to be a long time to get confirmation of your purchase, and then, see an error message instead?
Or are you an online merchant whose sales plunged during that same period of time?
If so, don't be too quick to blame the site from which you were trying to make a purchase, or (if you are the merchant) your web hosting company, your search engine optimization efforts, or fraudulent clicks on your search engine ads.
If the site in question uses Authorizenet as a payment gateway to process credit card charges, the real problem is that the payment gateway has been the target of intermittent large scale
distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks.
In simplest terms, what that means is that Authorizenet came under siege from hackers who directed so much Internet traffic at the site, that it prevented the site from operating at various periods during the week.
A few orders were getting through Authorizenet the day I was writing this article, and hopefully the problem will be solved by the time you read this. More importantly for credit card owners,
however is the fact that Authorizenet says no credit card data was compromised during the attack.
But even though credit card information was safe, both customers and
merchants were greatly impacted by the denial of service attack. Ecommerce
customers found they were unable to complete transactions after spending
their time to make their selections and enter their contact information and
credit card details.
Merchants were hit in the pocketbook. They not only lost sales, but lost the pay-per-click charges they may have been paying to advertise in search engines to get customers to the site.
Treacherous waters ahead for ecommerce sites?
What's a shame, is that this is yet another black mark against doing business of any kind of the web. Between credit card theft, identity theft, spam, spam blockers blocking legitimate email (like the Business Know-How Newsletter),
spyware and adware hijacking web pages, and phishing (which tricks Internet users into giving away password information, credit card information or bank information), the Internet seems like it's becoming unsafe at any speed for commerce.
And that would be a sad thing to happen. While the Internet has let businesses of all sizes reach new customers, its benefits for small businesses are of particular importance. Thanks to the power and reach of the Internet, the nation's smallest businesses can reach out easily beyond their local geographic area to find customers and to find suppliers, making it possible for them to compete on a more even footing with bigger businesses.
What can be done?
There's not much individuals can do to prevent distributed denial of service attacks, except to install a firewall on their own computer to prevent it from being taken over by hackers and used as part of such attacks.
MacAfee, Norton and ZoneAlarms are a few vendors offering firewall software.
But there are other measures you can take to protect against online fraud, identity theft and hijacking. Here are several important
tings you can do to protect yourself (and help support small merchants on the web at the same time.)
Test your computer for spyware, and if it's there remove it.
Spyware Begone is one program that tests and removes spyware. Testing is free. You have to buy the program to remove the spyware.
Don't click on links or ads that look out of place for the web site you are visiting. The ads or links could be placed their by adware or spyware on your computer. They may take you off to a competing site (depriving your favorite web site of money you'd rather spend with them than the competitor).
Be careful where you go online, what links you click on in email and what you download. Never click on a link in email that claims your bank, credit card company, ISP, or anyone else needs you to update your personal information. Those links take you to sites that either ask you for personal information and credit card numbers, or secretly download a program that watches what you type and steals your information. (Banks, credit card companies, PayPal and ISPs, don't "lose" customer data or send links in email to update customer data.)
Never open an email attachment even from a friend, unless you first verify that they have sent the file and it is something you want to open.
Never send credit card information in email. Email is not secure.
Be sure there is a lock symbol showing on the bottom of your web browser on the shopping cart page where you enter your credit card information. (The lock symbol is an indication that the web page you are on is on a secure server.)
If you have any questions about a purchase, call the online vendor before placing your order.
If you don't want to submit credit card information online, look for a phone number or a way to mail in your order to your favorite online vendors. If you are a business, ask the merchant if they accept purchase orders. (Because of the paperwork involved on both sides, try to restrict purchase orders to purchases of $100 or more.)
Print out your order (or look for an order form) and mail it with your check to the vendor.
If your are an online merchant, be sure your phone number is visible on every page of the site.
Make sure you move customers to a secure page before asking for their credit card information.
Offer customers a way to buy without putting their order through your shopping cart. (Mail in forms or taking calls on the telephone work.) Although having to have a staff member personally interact with each order takes away one of the advantages of doing business online, it also gives you an opportunity to do something that online shopping carts don't easily let you do: get feedback from the customer about how they found you, what other products they need, and even what they don't like about your competitors, or about your site.
Test direct mail to your existing customers. Although it's a lot less expensive usually to send out information about new products in email, some of your customers may never get your email.
Recent Columns
About the author
Janet Attard is the founder of
the award-winning Business
Know-How small business web site and information resource. Janet is
also the author of The
Home Office And Small Business Answer Book and of Business
Know-How: An Operational Guide For Home-Based and Micro-Sized Businesses with
Limited Budgets.
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