Starting an online business requires hard work. More than having a keen sense of what is sellable and valuable to your target market, you should take advantage of useful techniques that can heighten efficiency. For instance, you shouldn't be scrimping on security tools like address and phone verification, which can provide greater insight into who is interacting with your site.
You should also know the risks that come with selling online, including the following:

Hackers in the World Wide Web

One of the concerns that need to be properly addressed once you start your e-store is proper firewall protection against hackers. These computer criminals will both try to steal your business information and try to get into your customer's transaction record to obtain personal information.

Phishing is another urgent concern. This happens when a hacker sends out emails that pretend to be from your website, urging the customer to log in to a fake site that will steal their login information. For your customer's and your sake, post a noticeable reminder on your site to warn against logging into an account from an email link.

Fraudulent Transactions

Since bogus orders and chargebacks can be an online business's nightmare, it is a must for you to increase authentication of your contacts in order to reduce fraudulent transactions. But how do you do this?

Phone verification, for instance, can be integrated into your online store, CRM application, or another Internet-based business system to verify each individual contact with a live phone call or SMS message and for you to gain further contact information for better management of contact lists.

To verify phone not only allows for greater insight and control (flexible operations allowing you to customize your customer response) but also improves tracking system for your site.

Terms of Use

It is recommended that you hire a lawyer experienced in Internet law to help create terms of use contract for your site. This will indemnify you of any wrongdoing and ensure that you are legally collecting and distributing customer details. For instance, the Children's Online Privacy Act of 1998 states that it is illegal for a website owner to collect information from children under the age of 13 without a parent's consent.

"Copycat" Websites

Don't let other sites out there cash in on your online success! If your website starts to become popular and generates plenty of traffic, you might want to trademark your company logo and another unique image you use for identifying your business, such as your company slogan or motto. A website per se cannot be trademarked, so you have to take careful steps to protect yourself. Additionally, while you cannot patent the idea of an online supermarket, you can apply for a patent to the new kind of shopping cart you invented.