Secure Payment Page: What It Is and How to Create It
A fast and frictionless checkout process is essential for a positive customer experience. However, what is equally as important is how secure the transaction is.
Is your business’s payment page safe for your clients to use? Read ahead to find out how to determine its level of security and what features it should have.
What Makes a Payment Page Secure?
The payment page being secure implies that the sensitive data involved in any financial transaction is reliably protected from a variety of risks.
Risks Involved with Payments That Are Not Secure
If a merchant’s website operates with a payment page that doesn’t fulfill all the up-to-date security requirements, it’s dangerous for both the business and its clients. Here are some common risks associated with the lack of a payment page’s protection:
- Leak of sensitive information. Critical details associated with the customer and their credit card might end up in the hands of cybercriminals.
- Ruined reputation. If your customers experience issues with the security of your site’s payment services, it will affect your credibility.
- Potential bankruptcy. The acquiring bank or payment provider has the legal right to disable your merchant in case of non-compliance with the security standards and resulting risks of fraud and chargebacks.
These are only some of the major risks that come hand-in-hand with poor payment security. Below, you’ll find the best practices for avoiding such hazards.
How Can a Merchant Ensure Payment Security?
Even if you trust your payment service provider completely, it is best to ensure that your site and particularly the page that facilitates the credit card transaction flow feature the following characteristics:
1. Is PCI DSS-Compliant
PCI DSS is the set of guidelines and technical requirements that aims to ensure your website’s card payment environment is secure enough to process transactions that involve sensitive information.
It is of utmost importance to ensure that your site is compliant with the PCI DSS rules to avoid potential risks and charges.
2. It Has an SSL Certificate
Ensure that your website is protected with an SSL certificate. If it’s there, the address bar on your site will feature a clickable padlock symbol that leads you to the information about the platform’s owner.
Besides, the "https://" in the link of your website also signifies that it is protected by SSL.
Every payment provider requires the merchant to have the SSL certificate installed at least on the pages where the credit card information is being collected and forwarded to the gateway.
3. Has a Secure Login Screen and Member Area
Apart from SSL, it’s important that you provide your clients with a login screen and member area that hides their credit card details and other sensitive information from cybercriminals. One way to do it is to protect all forms with a CAPTCHA code verifier that effectively prevents hackers from implementing methods like SQL injection.
4. Only Asks for Essential Information
It is highly advisable that your payment page asks the client to provide only the information that is pertinent to the sale, such as full name and card details, because it minimizes the exposure of sensitive data to various risks.
5. Uses Data Encryption
Encryption is a way to turn sensitive data into a code that is difficult or virtually impossible to decipher. There are different encryption types, with one of the most progressive ones to date being tokenization - a method that transforms the information into a token (unique code) that cannot be decrypted.
Effective Ways of Ensuring Payment Security
With the steps and features mentioned above, you will have already done a lot to ensure your payment processing service is secure. However, there are more measures you can implement, including:
- Constantly monitoring the payment industry updates for new security requirements and software updates.
- Conducting safe information handling training for the members of your staff dealing with sensitive data.
- Avoiding storing customer details and outsourcing such services instead.
By offering a secure payment page and a protected ecosystem for processing the transactions, you are sure to achieve the desired level of customer satisfaction and brand image.