Once you’ve customized the look and feel of your store and have populated it with products, the next step is to make sure that customers can purchase products securely from your website. In general, customers will not buy anything from your store unless they see a padlock next to your URL when they are entering in sensitive information such as credit cards and passwords during checkout. They will not see the padlock on their browser unless you have an SSL certificate installed on your website.

What is SSL?

SSL stands for secure sockets layer and is responsible for encrypting and providing secure communications on the internet. Many people have the misconception that the information encrypted by SSL remains encrypted even after its been fully transmitted to the website. SSL only encrypts the data during transmission only!

What this means is that the website accepting these secure communications is responsible for safeguarding this information because its wide open after it’s been transmitted. For example, if a customer sends me their credit card information, its only encrypted on the way to my website. Once that information reaches me, I’m fully responsible for safe guarding the data. In general, I do not ever store credit card numbers in my data base at all because its too much responsibility to bear if someone ever hacks into my website.

Choosing a Brand of SSL Certificate

There’s a wide range of different brands of SSL certificates available for purchase. Some require very little verification whereas some certificates require a full background check before they are issued to you. In general, as long as most browsers recognize the SSL cert that you purchase, you should be fine purchasing even the cheapest of certificates.

No matter what grade of SSL cert you purchase, the encryption will be exactly the same. Purchasing a high grade SSL certificate is only important if you are a large company and you want customers to know that you are using the highest grade of security. For example, if you are opening a bank, you would want people to know that you are using a certificate that requires the highest level of background checks from a reputable issuing authority. Most of these companies who purchase high grade certificates add these logos to their sites to reassure their customers.

In general though, no one I know ever pays attention to the SSL certificate brand when they are buying something online. As long as customers see the good ole padlock, that means that the transmission is secure. When buying an SSL certificate, the most important thing is to make sure that most browsers will recognize it. If the browser doesn’t recognize a particular SSL certificate, a nasty popup window might arise which will cause a customer to lose confidence in the security of your website.

Make sure you have a static IP address

You will not be able to install an SSL certificate unless you have a static ip address for your website. Usually static IPs can be purchased from your webhost for a couple extra bucks a month.

Purchasing your SSL Certificate

Before you purchase your SSL cert, you need to make a decision on which URL you will use to conduct secure transactions. Are you going to use

http://yourstore.com

or

http://www.yourstore.com.

It is extremely important to register your certificate exactly with the URL you plan on using otherwise your certificate will not work.

You will also need to contact your webhost and generate a CSR(certificate signing request). The CSR will look like a bunch of random letters and numbers, but you will need to provide this information to the place where you are purchasing the SSL cert.

Installing your SSL Certificate

Once you’ve purchased and obtained the SSL certificate, you need to contact your host once again and have them physically install the certificate on the server itself. Once the certificate is installed successfully, you should be able to access your webpages securely when the https:// prefix is appended to your url.

For example, typing in

https://yourstore.com

should cause a padlock to come up next to your URL.

Troubleshooting

Sometimes even though your SSL certificate has been installed properly, you may still see a padlock with a slash through it. This means that there are probably certain elements on your page that are insecure.

• Are all of the graphics on the page stored on your domain? If you are hotlinking images from another website, you’ll need to make sure that the webpage you are grabbing them from are secure.
• Are you using Google Analytics? If you are using their older code snippets, you are required to use their ssl server when appending Google Analytics code to a secure webpage.

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