With a 50 percent increase in e-commerce cybercrime in 2020, the need for online businesses to reinforce their cybersecurity has never been more urgent.
A virtual private network (VPN) is the most helpful product for guaranteeing your business’s and its customers’ security.
But how does it work, and how will it prevent your website from being attacked?
Let’s find out.
How a VPN can protect your e-commerce business
As an e-commerce site owner, you expose yourself to risks that you would never experience as a private internet user.
- Your customers entrust their private financial information to you when making payments, and you must protect them from fraud and identity theft.
- You are legally obligated to protect not just financial data but all information visitors give to your site.
- You have confidential company information which you need to protect for commercial reasons.
So, what does a VPN help you with for your e-commerce business?
Here are the six ways a VPN can help to keep your e-commerce business safe.
1. It protects the data
Safeguarding your data is both a commercial and a legal requirement. Customers need to know they can safely enter their financial details when purchasing. With proper security, their data can be protected, and their money can be stolen.
Many countries make data protection a legal requirement for doing business within their jurisdictions. For example, the EU has its General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) law, which mandates minimum safeguards for the data of all site users.
2. It provides secure connections for remote workers
With 61 percent of all employees preferring to work entirely from home, e-commerce needs to adapt to the security implications of this development.
Remote workers for your company may be using various devices and public access systems. Nowadays, even small companies hire people from multiple locations, which is unavoidable.
A VPN guarantees that the connection is always secure. Your private, confidential company data is never at risk of exposure or theft, no matter how many remote employees or contractors you hire.
3. It allows you to bypass geo-restrictions
Running an e-commerce site means dealing with individuals and companies worldwide. You may need to source products or hire staff in multiple countries.
You could be up against many sites that block access from specific locations. Being tied down by these restrictions would make business impossible.
With a good VPN, these problems will disappear. By using servers in multiple locations, it will bypass any ban on site access by using a server in a country where access is unrestricted.
4. It allows you to test your site’s performance in other countries
If you’re trading internationally, knowing challenging to know how your site looks and performs in other parts of the world is often a problem.
Instead of visiting another country or hiring someone to test your site at that location, you can have your VPN use a server within that country to mimic its exact performance there.
This can be done to test your site in any country you choose and help solve problems of poor performance or compatibility.
5. It enables evaluating your competitors anonymously
To run an efficient and profitable business, you must research your competitors. Without a VPN, you leave a digital footprint of your online activity. This data can be collected and sold to your competitors, significantly compromising your research on their businesses.
As long as you have a VPN, there is no danger of anyone tracking your online activity. Everything is anonymous and untraceable, even to the most sophisticated methods of cyber surveillance.
6. It reduces the expense of running your business
A VPN subscription will decrease your business’ running costs.
- It allows you to hire remote staff from anywhere in the world without the cost of providing an office and without the risk of shared files being hacked or stolen.
- It allows you to reach markets in remote places. You can also check and improve your site’s performance anywhere in the world without leaving your country.
- Encrypting and securing all your customers’ information eliminates the danger of breaking the law, with the attendant fines and legal fees. It also removes the risk of breaking data protection legislation.
With these reductions in expenses, a VPN will quickly pay for itself.
Conclusion
As hackers and thieves become more skillful at breaking into carelessly guarded systems, the need for e-commerce security has never been greater.
Having your customers’ data stolen can result in decreased sales, fines and lawsuits against your company, and possibly irreparable damage to its reputation.
A VPN is a valuable tool to protect your e-commerce business:
- It hides your IP address, making your browsing history untraceable.
- It encrypts all data, making it secure from hackers and thieves.
- It bypasses geo-blocking, allowing you to access sites restricted to users in your country.
Even the total cost of a VPN over the lifetime of your business is a small price compared to the expense of a security breach. There is simply no reason not to have one.
