How To Secure Your Payment Gateway: 5 Tips For Ecommerce Store Owners

Payment flexibility is evolving. As online brands strive to meet customer needs for faster ecommerce payments, Buy Now Pay Later schemes and device-led checkout options such as Apple Pay, securing the payment gateway has become more important than ever before.

It’s no secret that online payments come with an element of risk for both the ecommerce store and its consumers. In fact, the ecommerce industry remains the most vulnerable sector to cybercrime, accounting for more than 32% of all cyber attacks.

Therefore, it’s vital to reinforce your payment gateway for smoother, safer conversions in 2025.

With this in mind, we’ve written a guide on how to bolster your online security and introduce best practices for secure payment processing.

Why is Ecommerce Security So Important?

As an e-commerce business, it’s likely that you’ll handle sensitive customer data numerous times a day.

This includes personal information and, most importantly, financial information such as a customer’s card number and banking details.

If your payment gateway is breached, this can result in the loss of this sensitive data, leading to direct financial losses for the customer and a loss of trust in your business.

There are a number of cybersecurity threats posing a risk to ecommerce business owners in 2024, so it’s important to stay vigilant when it comes to crafting your online security plan.

Here are some of the most common cybersecurity threats to look out for as an ecommerce seller:

• Phishing and social engineering attacks: These account for more than 20% of all cyber breaches and have been known to trick victims into giving away sensitive information such as passwords, credit card numbers and usernames. These come in the form of fake emails and website links, aiming to lure customers and store employees into a false sense of security.

• Malware: This type of cyber attack refers to malicious software that is used to gain unauthorised access to an ecommerce storefront. This plants viruses, Trojans and ransomware on a website. This could include infected advertisements, which have been known to result in the loss of customer data.

• DDoS Attacks: Otherwise known as a distributed denial of service attack, a DDoS breach allows a cybercriminal to flood your online store website with malicious traffic, preventing customers from accessing and making a purchase.

• SQL Injection: This is the injection of a code straight into your ecommerce site’s SQL database, which allows cybercriminals to access sensitive customer information and cause significant disruption to your online storefront.

While these are the most common forms of cyberattack, there are plenty more of them to watch out for.

With a secure payment gateway strategy in place, you reduce these cyber risks by more than half. Prioritising your website’s security breeds trusting customers, a positive seller reputation and peace of mind as a business in an increasingly unsecure world.

5 Ways To Secure Your Payment Gateway As An Online Store

The question is, how can you transform your own payment gateway into a cybercrime-free zone?

A payment gateway is the merchant service that processes a card payment for traditional brick-and-mortar stores, as well as an online e-commerce store.

Read on for five cyber attack-proof strategies to add to your ecommerce checkout process for a payment gateway that can’t be breached.

Implement Encryption Software

Introducing encryption software to your security process ensures that your sensitive data remains secure.

Encryption software helps prevent unauthorised access to any set of digital information using something called cryptography, which turns this data into an unreadable code.

Ecommerce brands can use encryption software to transform customer data into a code that is protected during transmission from the customer to the merchant.

This ensures that only someone with the decryption key is able to access customer details, such as financial information and personal information, once it has been transmitted via the payment network and to the intended recipient.

Integrate Your POS System

Ensuring that your online payment gateway is safe starts with improving your brick-and-mortar payment security.

For businesses operating in multiple locations, ensure that you centralise your customer data. This reduces the risks associated with transferring data manually between your brick-and-mortar store and your ecommerce platform.

To centralise your customer data, choose a point-of-sale system (POS) for your physical store that can be integrated with your e-commerce store.

When you integrate a POS with and ecommerce platform such as WooCommerce, for example, your in-store payments and online payments are instantly stored together for easy yet secure access to important customer information.

Introduce Multi-Factor Authentication

Introducing multi-factor authentication to your payment gateway reinforces your data protection.

A multi-factor authentication feature requires anyone making a payment to prove their identity using multiple factors. This means that as well as using a password, a user will also need to verify their identity by responding to a text message, using a security token, or using a fingerprint/faceID. The key here is to complete a set of individual actions rather than one.

Therefore, in the event of a data breach, a hacker must mimic numerous actions in order to gain access to sensitive information.

Add Tokenisation To Your Payment Processor

Tokenisation is the act of replacing a card number with a unique token that cannot be decrypted.

Tokenisation occurs before the encryption process. This means that if your encryption methods are breached, a decryption key will still be unable to reveal the card number in association with that transaction, and the customer data remains safely transmitted.

For example, if a customer provides their payment details when completing an online checkout form, the data is substituted with a randomly generated token that conceals their financial information.

Whether you invest in a payment processor that includes built-in tokenisation or outsource the process to a third-party tool, this strategy can add an extra layer of security to your transactions as an ecommerce seller.

Teach Your Employees How To Spot Cybercrime

Last but not least, ensure that your employees are well-educated on the dangers of cybercrime.

If your online store operates on a large scale and is managed by numerous employees, it’s important to regularly update their training on multi-factor authorisation as well as potential cyber threats such as unreliable emails and suspicious pop-ups.

Here are some of the ways to train your employees to spot cyber threats:

• Introduce data protection training during onboarding to help employees understand the importance of cybersecurity as early as possible.

• Teach staff members how to spot suspicious activity, such as the appearance of new programs on their devices or unfamiliar extensions or tabs in the browser.

• Enforce periodic password changes company-wide and educate employees on the dangers of using one universal password for all logins.

• Encourage employees to regularly back up their files to ensure that their data is safe in the event of a cyber breach.

If an employee is well-adapted to a cyber-safe working environment, they are less likely to make security-breach-level errors and are well-prepared to deal with the aftermath of a potential cyber attack.

Final Thoughts

Taking measures to improve your ecommerce cybersecurity is crucial If you want to remain credible in a volatile online landscape.

As you welcome flexible payment options at the online checkout, such as Apple Pay and Klarna, you attract more risks from emerging cybercriminals.

Reinforcing your payment gateway using the five strategies above could ensure that your data remains secure and untouched.

FAQs

Why Should You Prioritise Ecommerce Security?

Ecommerce security is essential if you want to maintain the loyalty and trust of your customer base. If your online store is frequently breached, you’ll lose credibility as an industry player as well as your reputation as a trusted seller.

What Is a Payment Gateway?

A payment gateway is a merchant service that processes a card payment for traditional brick-and-mortar stores as well as an online e-commerce store.

Is Ecommerce Cybercrime On The Rise?

Digital payment methods such as BNPL schemes and device-led checkout options such as Apple Pay and Google Pay continue to raise the risk of cybercrime for ecommerce stores. In fact, the ecommerce industry remains the most vulnerable sector to cybercrime in 2024, accounting for more than 32% of all cyber attacks.