Do you need SSL “SSL Certificate” for your online store?
Ecommerce is a very complex business and every business owner needs to know at least the very basics of ecommerce website design in order to fully understand the complexity. So lets say you have your ecommerce website ready to launch and your web developer tells you to get a SSL Certificate.
Do you really need it? The answer depends whether you will be processing credit card payments on your website or a third party website. Lets look at both scenarios.
Accept payments on your site: This requires you to encrypt all the transactions so that all the data that gets transferred is being securely transmitted. In this case you must get a SSL certificate since you are liable for processing these payments.
Process payments on a third party website: This option will send your customers on another website e.g PayPal.com and after the payment is fully processed they will be re-directed back to your website. In this case you do not need to buy an SSL certificate since you are not liable for encrypting this transactions. All you are doing is sending the user to the merchant who processes credit cards securely.
So where you need an SSL certificate or not it depends on what kind of ecommerce system you end up using.
