In 2011, a blogger revealed about a fake Apple store in China. Even the salespeople inside the store are so convinced that they thought they were working for a real Apple store. The point is when faking something like an Apple store and the products inside is possible, then faking an online ecommerce site not so hard. And for the same reason, you should be more careful. Otherwise, you can lose customers and eventually your ecommerce business brand name would be spoilt to a point where it is too hard to sort things out.
Protect Your Ecommerce Business Brand
Apart from that, your customers will not stick around if your ecommerce site is sluggish. Or if it does not have proper security like unlimited subdomain protection. And customers abandon shopping carts when the checkout process takes long. When you want to build a strong business brand, your eCommerce website should be secure, fast, and reliable along with excellent products/service. Plus, you should protect your eCommerce business brand from hackers, scammers, and fraudsters.
Besides, fraudsters try to poach your customers on social media with similar-looking pages and better following. For that reason, you need to be active on social media and should be in constant touch with your customers. Plus, report any such fake pages of your brand. Here we explain some common traps and pitfalls and how to avoid them. So that you can protect your eCommerce business brand.
Using a Similar Domain Name
Generally, for your brand, you will have a website where you sell goods. Let’s say, the domain name is example.com. And you would register some other domain names like example.co.uk, example.in.
Now a fraudster will register a domain name like mydomain.xyz and will start posing as your brand to lure customers. Usually, this is coupled with manipulating SEO so that the fraud site would be ranked higher than your site. And your customers think that the fraud site is the original one.
This is called Cybersquatting. You can take legal help to protect your brand from Cybersquatting. And for this reason, you need to register your brand logos and products as a trademark.
Hurting the Brand Reputation
Often your competitors — or someone who despises you—will add bad reviews and will spread bad word of mouth. And these reviewers will suggest an alternate product/service. If you have owned and are maintaining your eCommerce store — using services like Shopify — then you can opt to display reviews from the real buyers. Or the ones that are authentic.
On social media like Facebook, it is hard to stop the fake reviewers. Here, you can subtly ask them to provide detailed information on when they have made the purchase, etc. And you can follow-up.
Spam Mails and Fake Stores
With some tools available, copying your entire website and hosting it at another address is not a hard task.
After creating a fake ecommerce store that looks exactly like yours, the bad guys will send emails to your customers with irresistible offers and asks them to click on the link to avail the discount. The link usually makes the customer visit the fake site. And nudges the visitor to make the purchase.
The problem is, after purchasing, the buyer might not even receive any product. Or they might receive counterfeit merchandise.
For this reason, you have to Trademark your brand, and you can send these fake stores a legal notice. Moreover, you can go to a court to resolve this. Plus, keep an eye out so that these fake stores won’t slide under your nose.
Do these essential things, so you don’t have to worry
Use Online Security Build the Strong Brand
You might use www.example.com as your front page, and a sub-domain for the customer login, like account.example.com.
When you buy a regular SSL certificate, only your primary domain is protected. To ensure that all your subdomains are also secure, you should install wildcard SSL certificate. A wildcard certificate protects and gives unlimited subdomain encryption. A wildcard certificate, however, costs you more than a regular one.
If you are tight on budget and looking for good customer support, Cheap SSL Shop provides wildcard certificates—that gives you unlimited subdomain protection—at affordable prices.
Do Not Collect/Store Unnecessary Data
In this age of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Data analysis, it feels like more data means better insights. But it is often wrong. However, data like visitor demographics and traffic rate is essential.
Identify which data is necessary and which is not. And stop collecting information that does not help you or your customers. Because, the more the data, the more time it consumes to keep it safe.
Also, ensure that all the data you have is encrypted with at least 256-bit encryption. Otherwise, if someone steals your data, you will run into big troubles.
Remind Your Customers to Change the Password
If your customer accounts are not secure or compromised, it takes a toll on your eCommerce brand reputation.
So, ask your customers to change their account password at least once in a 90 days period. Moreover, while signing up, ensure that only strong passwords are used with a combination of numeric, symbols, upper and lowercase letters.
Conclusion
It takes a lot of work-hours and hard work to build a reputed e-commerce business brand. Without proper brand reputation management, your brand name may get down with no time. By following the above steps, you can be safe and secure.
In addition, keep your software up to date. Often these software updates include patches to known security issues or performance improvements.
Finally, make sure that your admin accounts are using a secure password. If hackers get access to your admin accounts, then it is all over. The damage goes a long way and can even potentially bring lawsuits for not protecting the customer data adequately.
So, it is better safe than sorry. Make sure you have got everything right and keep working on eliminating and diffusing the acts of fraudsters.