When you want to run your own online business, making sure you have the skills to market your new venture can seem like the biggest priority. However, this is not all there is to convincing customers to trust you as an enterprise.
In an age where there is a really substantial level of fear about identity fraud, and where customers worry a lot about what you are going to do with personal information they have to give you to do business with you, like their contact details and payment credentials, being able to assure customers you are equipped to manage their data safely can be key.
What Are Users Most Concerned About?
In general, most people accept that to take advantage of things like ecommerce, online banking and social media, they will have to give personal information to businesses. However, they do this only when they trust that that information will not be misused, and will be protected by good IT security protocols.
Data privacy has been a concern for users for as long as the internet has been in mainstream use, but as rates of cyber crime and identity theft have grown, and numerous scandals like the PlayStation account hacking and HBO hacking have been reported, it is not really surprising that people feel unease around giving out data online.
Why Is This Important for Online Businesses?
As soon as a customer doesn’t feel like their data is going to be safe, they are likely to back out of a purchase. Abandoned shopping carts account for between 65 and 75% of shopping carts (depending on the year and how the stats were collected), and literally trillions of dollars in missed sales. Concerns about the data security of a site often play a part in why people abandon online shopping carts, and this is something that can directly affect your business.
Even outside of ecommerce, customers are far more reluctant to give details when they are not sure how their information will be used. Nobody likes the idea of their personal details being vulnerable to hackers or exposed.
Learning Data Assurance and Security
Happily, there is a whole field of IT focused on information security, and you can study this online by doing something like an online information security degree which you can study from home in your own time. A lot of well respected universities offer an online information assurance program, so you can be sure of obtaining the kind of knowledge and qualifications your customers will respect when they look at your credentials.
Online crime is becoming a bigger and bigger concern for internet users, and most of their concerns center around how safe it is to give entities access to their data – whether it is retailers they shop with or the government. By studying this field of IT, you as an entrepreneur can reassure your customers that your business has a good control over this, and ultimately win more business.
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