How will you be doing your holiday shopping this year?
In a survey released Monday by Gartner they say that $2 billion in e-commerce sales will be lost in 2006 due to security fears by consumers.
About 1 half of those losses come from people who avoided sites that seemed to be less secure.
The rest of the losses are from consumers who avoid doing any online shopping for fear of fraud.
For online retailers the news is a major headache. Many sites security features are not visible to the consumer.
Most sites will have a sign informing consumers of their secure network. Also the issuing company against fraud protects most credit card purchases.
The real risk to consumers is fairly low but not unheard of.
Unfortunately I can speak from first hand experience on this issue. Several weeks ago I had a message from my bank’s fraud department to call them concerning some unusual purchases. I had recently ordered some items online through a third party. It seems someone was having a good time charging a variety of items on my account.
I have been shopping online for several years and have never had an issue before so I consider myself fairly lucky. When I told one friend what had happened he said he had been through a similar experience 3 times previously.
Author of the report Avivah Litan told eWeek.com “A layered approach to solving security problems is the most effective. Companies should implement back-end fraud detection, stronger user authentication [beyond single-factor passwords], transaction verification for high-risk transactions and data masking/truncation of sensitive data that is shown on Web-based screens.”
Where does this leave the consumer?
You are probably safe shopping online from established sites. But you never know as my dear mom likes to point out “You think you are safe but your not”.
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Mike is a staff writer for murdok. Visit murdok for the latest ebusiness news.
