Secure Your Shopping Cart With SSL

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Secure Your Shopping Cart With SSL

Merchants with an online store will be taking sensitive information from their customers such as credit card numbers or home addresses. It is important that this information is encrypted. To accomplish this, you need to use an Secure Socket Layer (SSL) certificate. This will allow you to secure any directory, web page or shopping cart system through a secure server. Most certificates use 128-bit encryption technology to ensure complete protection of your customer's information.

You have several ways of using an SSL certificate:

You can purchase your own SSL certificate from any SSL authorized seller, such as Godaddy, Thawte, Verisign or Geotrust. The price for a certificate runs anywhere from $29 to $895 per year. The web site address to secure your web pages would be one of the following formats:

- https://www.yourdomain.com
- https://www.yourdomain.com/name-of-folder/
- https://name-of-folder.yourdomain.com
Check with your web hosting company to find out if a shared SSL certificate is available with your service plan. The only difference in using your own certificate versus a shared one is the web site address. The protection and security is no different.