Overview

The concern of most people when buying online is how secure it is. People worry that their personal information such as name and address will be intercepted or given to other companies for advertising, but their major concern with Ecommerce is how secure their transaction will be. People often ask, "Can people get my credit card number?", and "What happens if my credit card is stolen and used to buy from you?"

The truth is that it is more secure to buy online using your debit/credit card than it is making a purchase in a shop, or telephone, or even by fax. Think about it, in a shop people can look over your shoulder and see your pin number, or forge your signature on a stolen card. Unscrupulous people can listen in on you when ordering over the telephone, or pick up a fax that's left on a fax machine. Where as your information is encrypted (scrambled) when transmitted online and can only be read by the systems that process the transaction.

So since you type in your information there is no chance of people over hearing your details. Your information is encrypted and sent to another computer, so it can't easily be intercepted, and even if it was it would be almost impossible to read. Last but not least the transactions are processed by the computer so your data is not left lying around on bits of paper, so can not be picked up and read!

Transaction Encryption

When data is transferred from our site to payment gateway it is encrypted by your web browser (providing you are using a modern browser such as Internet Explorer 5 or Firefox) using 128 bit SSL (Secured Socket Layers). This means that the data is scrambled using an encryption key (sequence of numbers) that has 288 or 309,485,009,821,345,068,724,781,056 different possible combinations, and can only be unscrambled by the same key at the other end. Security experts believe modern computers will not be able to crack this level of encryption in a reasonable time for around about 10 years.

Address Verification - AVS

The address your credit card is registered to is compared to the billing address supplied when ordering. To pass this test both the supplied billing address and the address held by the card issuer must match.

Card Security Code - CSC

This check compares the payment cards security code to the cards details held by the card issuer.