Is It Safe to Buy from Shopify Stores? How to Avoid Scam as A Customer
By Sam Nguyen
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As most of us here have already known that Shopify is an eCommerce platform, which used by over 600 thousand merchants worldwide. For over five years, developers all over the world have consistently rated Shopify as the best eCommerce platform of the Year in terms of functionality and scalability.
Knowing the fact that shopping online is very convenient, but sometimes you must make sure that the website you are in is legitimate and you are safe when buying from a website. So, it is essential to assess whether Shopify is a safe platform.
So, I have written this article today in order to answer the biggest question: Is It Safe to Buy from Shopify Stores?. Plus, I also offer you some quick tips list to help you stay safe when shopping online as a customer. Let’s get started!
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Is Shopify a Safe Platform?
What are those criteria that can turn an eCommerce website into a secure one? There are five main security points that I think we should know while assessing a suitable platform. Also, how these criteria are protected on Shopify. For more details of each one, follow these lines below:
Credit Card Data
The first one that we must think about is payment security, which refers to your Credit Card Data. Usually, the customer enters their credit card number as a form of payment when they charge you. There are some payment gateways that don’t capture your credit card data on your server, like Tokenized, for example. However, there are some that require you to have your store’s credit data touches the server, which makes you need a fully secure and PCI compliant server to manage the transactions. At the same time, help your customers shop without worrying about security.
What if you have your customers’ credit card data stolen from your website? Of course, you will lose those customers permanently. Plus, you will be more likely to take responsibility for that problem by facing legal action. There were some brands that have undergone some lacking payment data problems like this, some of them got their brand demand, some stay the same. But, on the whole, having a person’s name, email address, credit card data stolen will lead to money was taken, which is the thing that no merchants and customers want.
On Shopify, it is designed to have the PCI level 1 compliant for credit card processing. This means this platform has already adhered to the highest standards of server compliance, at the same time, the highest standards in the world on payment processing. Even when you have not started your business or spend any dollars on Shopify, it is always set in PCI compliant and provides you the fully secure payment processing. As a consequence, you can freely accept your payments and don’t have to think much about credit card security.
Plus, inserting code to the checkout makes this procedure probably become insecure and the data can be skimmed easily. As a result, Shopify limits this checkout process not to be customized too much by store owners on Shopify. Some people can find this annoying.
Customer Data
During your customers’ checkout, you, as a merchant, will be able to capture a lot of data about them, and this will normally be stored in the database. These data include some information such as name, address, email address, products ordered, passwords, and so on.
Making sure whether your customer data secure, or whether you are capable of securely storing customer data in line with the laws in your country is so important when you are a store owner. Every country has data protection laws that require business owners to comply with it. In case you fail to keep your customer data secure, it will be more likely that you have to undergo legal action and fines.
There are a variety of measures have been introduced by Shopify so as to secure customer data for so many years. You can use the Shopify integration to collect customer data, automatically update it safely and securely. Shopify has its measures to avoid leaking data by limiting the login attempts and ensuring app developers only have access to the data they need to run the apps. So, there is no doubt that customer data is very safe on Shopify due to its ecosystem.
Fraud Protection
Fraudulent order is also the thing that some users might place with your store while it is undetected. In case people do that, you will be more likely to lose your money hand over. Once these fraudsters determine their easy target, most of them will hit you hard and run quickly without any hints. This problem will depend on the industry that you are in because there are some products that can are commonly defrauded than others. So, it is necessary for you to have measures in place in order to deal with potentially fraudulent transactions to avoid risks.
There is a powerful fraud prevention system on Shopify, which is designed to flag potentially fraudulent orders. Consequently, you will be able to manually review them before processing. Additionally, you will be given full control over the whole setup, like deciding to set your orders to be manually fulfilled or automatically fulfilled. If orders are flagged as suspicious, these will be investigated before being dispatched. The flaws often lie in the address mismatch or multiple attempts of different cards, etc.
SSL
SSL, which shorts for Secure Sockets Layer, is a crucial element nowadays for most online businesses. It is a basic requirement to have all the content and all scripts on your website served over SSL. With SSL, you will have the chance to protect your payments securely as well as to stop these deceitful external scripts from doing tricks to your website or to the browsers of your customers.
As a matter of fact, all Shopify stores are issued with SSL throughout. This means whenever you are not loading any insecure scripts, you will have the SSL working throughout the store within some clicks. In Shopify’s monthly fees, you will have the SSL certificate included and don’t have to pay for additional costs as well.
Admin Security
It is also crucial for store owners to answer each of these two questions carefully:
- Is the admin area of your website safe and secure?
- Do you have any measures in place to stop brute force attacks?
In case you have an attacker that gets access to your store admin account, you will give them the access right to everything and you even might lose control of the entire website. The more successfully your online business runs, the bigger chance that your store is the target of hacking attempts.
On Shopify, there is a secure back-end available to provide a user the privilege system for merchants. This means the account owners, themselves, will be able to send out staff accounts with different privilege levels. Some security steps must be taken in order to authenticate and block access, also protect the admin and staff accounts from brute force attempts.
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Answered: Is Buying from a Shopify Hosted Store Safe?
In general, the answer is Yes. It is totally safe to buy from stores that are hosted by Shopify. However, we can not avoid scammers when we are not careful. In the Payment Processing section, if the store that you are going to buy uses a decent installment supplier like: Accept Payments Anywhere, Send Money, Pay Online or Set Up a Merchant Account - PayPal, Stripe.com, etc. then you can stay calm as the credit you entered is https page.
Plus, the installment that you make will occur on the installment supplier structure, but not in your store. At the same time, you can ensure that your card details are being moved to the payment provider directly, not to the third-party: Shopify.
How to Avoid Scam on Shopify Store
This section is going to focus on these quick tips that you can apply to help you avoid scams and stay safe while shopping on Shopify.
Check for Contact Detail
In order to determine whether a store is legitimate, you can look at the contact details on its site. In case the contact that you saw only includes a web contact form, which doesn’t have any address, email, and phone number, then you should be suspicious of that store as it can be fraudulent. As a matter of fact, these online stores that are genuine online stores would help you to answer any doubts that you still have in your mind. So, it’s best to check for the contact detail and get in touch to see whether they are real.
Look at Customer Feedback
The Customer Feedback section is also a great place to check on a specific website so that you can see if there are any customer reviews about the products or the company. You can utilize the searching tool of your browser to search by typing the name of the website, plus the words “scam” or “fake” on the search bar. Then, the result that shows you will quickly tell you whether that store had bad experiences or not, to gain your trust.
Whois Lookup
Typically, while running a website, store owners often supply the registration details to the organizations, where their domain name is regulated. Knowing this, you can type the website address of the online store in the searching bar of after browsing the link below: https://www.whois.com/whois/
By doing this way, you will be able to define who has registered the site that you want to investigate. In case the details match the contact details listed on the website, then this brand is more likely to get trust from to buy online.
Overall Look and Feel
When you arrive on a specific website, the overall look and feel are also so important to check whether it is real or not. There are some criteria that you should focus on. The first thing is about how professional the site looks. You can see whether it has the quality layout or the high-resolution images or the language has no grammar and spelling errors. You can utilize these tips by making a comparison with the site that you have already trusted, and find out the differences.
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Conclusion
On the whole, Shopify is totally a highly secure SAAS platform, which makes it hard to find another eCommerce platform that is safer than Shopify. Also, I have provided some tips above to help you tell whether a site is safe and genuine.
Of course, these tips alone will not absolutely confirm that a website is safe, but I believe when you combine them, it is going to help you in finding the right answers. I really hope this time article can help you avoiding Scam as a customer on Shopify. If you still have something on your mind, feel free to ask us. We will help you with that.
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