Do you know how important ecommerce security has become for every B2B ecommerce business? You must have read or heard about scandalous cybercrimes on the Internet. You must have also heard about how companies are fined (in millions) for unintentional leaking of customers’ data/employees’ data, which of course they never commit.
As technology is advancing, security threats have also multiplied. Hackers are innovating new schemes to access the backend of B2B ecommerce platforms and use it to make millions of dollars. To defeat their efforts in hijacking your personal data about customers and company, you need a secure ecommerce framework implemented on your site.
Here are some recent instances of security breaches in the ecommerce industry.
In 2020, the number of cyberattacks soared to 445 million+ in total, which is double the number of attacks that happened in 2019 (Helpnet Security).
In January 2020, Mitsubishi Electric, a B2B wholesale site dealing in electric equipment encountered a security breach into their systems. The breach cost them a loss of 200 MB of private files. Files contained personal information about their 1987 applicants, 4566 employees, and 1569 retired employees of affiliate companies. Some sales-related information was also hijacked.
Gearbest, a highly successful Chinese eCommerce company, confronted a similar database breach. Cyberattackers get access to 1.5 million records, which involve sensitive information such as payment information, billing address, order history, and much more highly sensitive information.
Before moving on to commerce security features in a B2B ecommerce platform, let us first know about types of security threats and their corresponding harms.
SQL injections: A technique to hack your site database by injecting malicious code in SQL statements
Cross-site Scripting (XSS): When a cyber attacker places a malicious script in the data to a different end-user, via a web application
Customer journey hijacking (CJH): A process followed to ruin a company’s online traffic and reputation, where pop-up ads are flashed onto your visitors’ browser. Usually, after clicking these pop-up ads, users are redirected to some spammy sites
Trojan Horses: An attack is usually done by sending an official-looking email with an attached file, containing a malicious code. If the user opens the file, the code gets activated and may damage your data
Brute Force Attacks: Here hackers use a hit and trial method to crack the login info or steal encryption keys or find a hidden page of your B2B ecommerce platform
Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack: A practice to crash your site server by flooding it with requests from multiple IP addresses, at the same time
- Phishing: A trick used by hackers to steal a customer’s payment details by sending a fake email/message in the disguise of a popular company. Phishing-related attacks contribute to 80% of total security threats. (ID agent)
Table of Contents
- Top security features to look into a B2B ecommerce platform
- Final takeaway
Top security features to look into a B2B ecommerce platform
1. Offers various authentication methods
The ecommerce platform should offer multiple types of authentication factors to add extraordinary security to your site. Here’s a comprehensive explanation of the different verification methods:
- Two-factor authentication (2FA): Often called dual-factor authentication or two-step verification, adds an extra layer of security to your B2B ecommerce platforms. Two-factor authentication methods rely on a user providing a password, as well as a second factor, usually either a security token(OTP) or a biometric factor, such as a fingerprint or facial scan.
- Multi-factor Authentication (MFA): It is an authentication method that requires the user to provide two or more verification factors to gain access to a resource such as an application, online account, etc.
Let’s take a real-life example of MFA
You log in to your Bank Account with your Email ID/Username and Password. For additional security, the bank demands an additional security check and asks you to enter the OTP sent to your registered mobile number. Not only this, but it also asks you to complete the Captcha verification to access the account. This type of authentication is called multi-factor authentication.
How StoreHippo Authentication features help?
StoreHippo offers a 2-step authentication and authorization process where users have to go through two-step security -1) Captcha 2) User verification. This process helps you in preventing any third person from accessing the sensitive data on your ecommerce website. You can even customize the authentication process in the backend and can deploy your own.
As a result, your employees can securely access the desired data without parking sensitive data in the hands of hackers.
2. PCI DSS payment gateways
Why are secured payment gateways critical in a B2B wholesale platform? To prevent customer’s sensitive information from cyber attackers, a secure payment solution encrypts the data provided by the customer.
What essential security features are required in payment gateways?
Payment gateways should use Address Verification Service (AVS) and Card Code Verification (CCV) to ensure high-end protection. To help B2B ecommerce merchants in identifying and mitigating insecure transactions, it should use a Fraud Detection Suite (FDS). Not only this, they should comply with industry security standards like PCI, SAS 70, and SDP.
StoreHippo has 60+ integrated payment gateways that can be activated at a click. Moreover, all the gateways are PCI DSS compliant that encrypts all the transactions and blocks hackers' paths to hack payment details.
Some of the popular payment solutions include - Authorise.net, PayPal, Paytm, CC Avenue, AmazonPay, Stripe,
3. Server security
To keep your server secure, the ecommerce platform should offer -
Support for both HTTP and HTTPS domains
Data Encryption while transfering sensitive data from one server to another
Timely updates of software to protect it from security breaches
Payment Security to secure customer transaction data
Web application firewall for Automatic protection from known/unknown vulnerabilities.
Strong Authentication and Authorization module
Get extreme server security in StoreHippo B2B ecommerce Platform
StoreHippo uses strong one-way encryption to protect your sensitive data like the passwords of users. You also get the unique threat intelligence of Microsoft Azure, which offers additional protection to stores built on StoreHippo. StoreHippo secures and safeguards your data and network using the Azure cloud computing platform and services. The no No-SQL database MongoDB used by StoreHippo stamp out all critical issues (like SQL injection) faced by RDBMS systems.
4. Secure Socket Layer (SSL) certificates
SSL will add an additional layer of security to your B2B ecommerce site. It will trespass the security attacks initiated by hackers. With an SSL certificate, you can encrypt all your transactions that happen between your site and the customer browser. The benefit of implementing an SSL certificate is increased trust and confidence of customers while giving any personal information. SSL also proved to be an advantage from an SEO perspective as Google gives priority in first-page ranking to those sites that contain SSL.
StoreHippo offers a free SSL certificate. So that you don’t have to undergo complex procedures of getting such certificates. Don't worry about the annual renewals, our system will automatically renew it with the best SSL certificate with 2048 bit encryption.
5. Prevents cross scripting and HTML injection
As mentioned above, cross-scripting can infect your B2B ecommerce platform with bugs and breaches. In cross-scripting, a cyber attacker injects a malignant script in a web browser of a buyer accessing your site and then, adds the malicious script to your web page or application.
To execute a cross-site scripting attack, a hacker usually triggers your site’s forums, message boards, comment/review section of web pages, etc.
To eliminate cross-site forgery, StoreHippo has built-in features of the latest AngularJS that automatically alleviate the ecommerce security issues. Moreover, all the StoreHippo themes are 100% secure and designed to steer clear of XSS attacks.
6. Audit log
In simple words, an audit log refers to maintaining a record of all IT activity, including suspicious activity. Network engineers, web developers, and administrators use audit logs to enhance site performance, increase accountability, and keep the system stable.
The audit/ log is an inbuilt feature in StoreHippo that predicts and identifies potential security breaches. You also get detailed reports to monitor and track changes done by various users. In StoreHippo B2B wholesale platform, you can troubleshoot ecommerce security issues on an everyday basis. You can even recover your data by finding “updated data” and comparing it with the unchanged version.
7. User roles
Your B2B ecommerce store should have multiple users to streamline the management of day-to-day ecommerce operations. Each user should have their own account, with permissions limited to only their areas of responsibility.
Your B2B wholesale platform must provide the functionality to assign roles to your staff. You can limit the control of your backend by leveraging different types of roles like Super Admin, Administrator, Editor, Author, Contributor, and Subscriber.
B2B ecommerce solutions are about having a variety of complex user roles with each having access to specific parts of the database. The feature to assign granular user roles makes it easier to manage the B2B setup.
8. Separate login for retailers and distributor
To safeguard the login process of your vendors, your platform should offer the below features-
- Option to set Password Hygiene: Your ecommerce platform should offer you the functionality to create custom password hygiene for secure login. Here are some instances of password hygiene you cam implement -
Passwords should contain at least character, number, and special symbols.
Password should not start with your name/surname/DOB, etc
MFA Feature: Having multiple authentication factors(MFA) in the wholesale platform offers a greater degree of assurance about the login security of consumers
Option to limit Login and password reset attempts: From your ecommerce platform, you can set a limit on the number of login attempts per user and if someone crosses the limit, his IP will automatically be blocked from accessing the server
Option to Limit session length: You should also be able to decide on how long a user is allowed to remain logged in after being inactive for some hours. Like if they remain inactive on that particular tab for 20 minutes, you can automatically serve them with a pop-up saying ”session expired, login again” to re-authenticate them
Final takeaway
B2B ecommerce security is both important to your customer and to yourself. Hence, it is important that you choose a reliable ecommerce wholesale software that is end-to-end encrypted and has all the features highlighted above.
StoreHippo is an advanced cyber protection B2B ecommerce platform that prevents harmful traffic from entering your database. StoreHippo has offered a multilayer ecommerce security
Launch a B2B ecommerce website with StoreHippo in a few clicks. Sign up for 14 days free trial to experience its inbuilt tools and technologies.
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