Evolution of E-Commerce E-commerce has become one of the most prevalent changes in the way we do business today. Businesses, before the creation of the web, were typically at a physical location where customers could come, browse, try-on, and purchase goods and services. Some of the disadvantages of this business model were: customers restricted by location, the need for larger amounts of inventory, larger retail space, and more employees to cover customer-service.
E-commerce began with the advent of the Internet and started as billboards for information and advertisement purposes. Then as technology developed through the early 1980s, it grew into e-mail purchasing (Compuserve). From there, the World Wide Web, internet browsers
The Secure Electronic Transaction protocol was also developed to protect payment transactions and uses digital certificates to authenticate each party in the transactions (digital wallet software). SET eventually went by the wayside and was replaced by another program known as 3-D Secure and SSL was superseded by Transport Layer Security (TLS).
Shopping Carts, Payment Systems and Databases – are parts of an order processing system which has been developed over the last twenty years. This system allows customers to shop through use of databases which can store a variety of information. Most systems use a varied architecture where the database is housed on the webserver and the client uses the web browser to search through the database. Because of their unique nature, this allows for vulnerabilities which can lead to on-line attacks such as SQL Injection, Price Manipulation, Buffer Overflows, Cross-site Scripting and Remote Command Execution. These vulnerabilities can be safeguarded against by making sure you filter data coming from the client and use input validation - defining rules for length, type, syntax, and the use of coding best practices. Security should also perform web security audits, have all access roles set at the lowest privileges, use scrubbing software, multiple firewall