Customers need to feel safe when they make online purchases. They need to know that the payment or account data they are providing to the merchant is transmitted and handled in a secure way.

To protect customer information, an online merchant will comply with the Payment Card Industry’s Digital Security Standard and, also, use a 128-bit or great secure socket layer (SSL) to ensure that sensitive data passes back and forth between the web browser and the web server. Having taken the steps necessary to secure a payment transaction, online merchants want some way to show their potential customers that they have done everything possible to make shopping secure.

Enter VeriSign’s Secure Site Pro with Extended Validation. First, the service provides 128- or 256-bit SSL encryption, meaning that it offers the most powerful encryption available to protect payment information as it passes between your servers and web browsers. Second, the service provides you with two clear ways to market this to your customers.

Top Notch Encryption

SSL is a protocol that was originally developed to facilitate secure communications over an insecure network.

When a consumer surfs to your website, checks out some products, that consumer has no real way of know if you are who you say you are. You might claim to be reputable, but how would they know?  An SSL solves this problem since SSL certificates are unique to a particular server and domain name. When a consumer’s browser makes contact with the web server, the SSL ensures that your customer knows who he or she is dealing with through a process called public key cryptography. It is used to encrypt data. The other key is private and secret. It is used to decipher data encrypted with the public key.

Next, when a customer sends data over the Internet, which is generally an insecure network, how does that customer know that some hacker is not lurking, and waiting to intercept credit card or account data.  The more complicated the encryption, the more secure the data. VeriSign’s Secure Site Pro offers up the 256-bit encryption. This means that if someone were trying to guess the encryption code it would take that person several billion years to have tried every possible combination.

Recognizable Security Badge

Once a site has been secured with the Secure Site Pro SSL certificate, the site owner gets to display a VeriSign Secured Seal. The seal lets a site owner brag about all of the good work that has been done to ensure that a customer’s data isn’t intercepted or stolen. And seals like this one have a positive effect on sales.

Price

VeriSign’s Secure Site Pro with EV SSL is $1,499 per year if billed annually.