Despite assurances that progress is being made to secure transactions online, consumers still have overwhelming concerns about the safety of sharing personal information when making an online purchase or conducting banking business.
The Identity Theft Resource Center’s (ITRC) recent research* shows that 87% of consumers who have done online shopping or banking in the past 30 days are worried about the safety of their credit card numbers and other personal information. Online shoppers are concerned that merchants will lose their personal and financial information in a data breach. This chart illustrates ITRC findings that over a third of the study participants are also concerned about phishing, stolen passwords and user names and spam email.
Bad news for online retailers
The results of a data breach can be devastating for an online merchant. 73% of respondents said they would stop making purchases at that website if a breach occurred. And 68% said they would tell their friends about the breach at the offending website. With the popularity of social networking, this word-of-mouth bad news spreads like wildfire, and it takes time and a great deal of effort to repair the damage to the site’s reputation.
Good news for online retailers
These findings demonstrate how important it is for online merchants and banks to take steps to protect their customers’ privacy. Communicating their trustworthiness and safety to consumers is also essential.
70% of online consumers look for a trust seal before conducting business with a website. Displaying the WOT Trust Seal on the site makes it easy for potential customers to verify that the site is trusted, safe and secure. Website reputation ratings are powered by WOT’s global community of millions of users who have rated the reputation of 30 million websites.
Learn how you can get a WOT Trust Seal for your site.
Participate in the WOT poll and answer the question, "What actions fo you take to reduce the chances of your personal and financial information from being stolen online?"
*The findings are part of the ITRC’s 2010 national survey to monitor trends in “Consumer Concerns about Internet Transactions.”