Is Shopify Safe?

Is Shopify safe to start your own ecommerce site if you were a merchant?

And is it safe to buy from a Shopify store if you were a customer?

How safe is this platform? And what measures can you take in order to make sure that you are protected against fraud, stealth, and hackers, whether you were a seller or a buyer?

These questions and more, I will be answering in this short guide, so that you know how to stay safe and secure.

Without further ado, let’s begin!

Is Shopify Safe to Use?

Generally speaking, Shopify is a safe platform for merchants who want to sell products to their customers, and it is a safe platform for buyers who want to buy from a Shopiy-hosted store when it comes to their credit card data, but when it comes to their other information and the products they buy, it depends on each store separately.

Following are the details about how safe Shopify is for both, merchants who want to sell on Shopify, and buyers who want to purchase from a Shopify store.

Is Shopify Safe for Customers to Buy from?

The answer on this questions comes in two parts: one is related to the credit card info, and the other is related to the quality of products you buy.

Regarding your credit card data, Shopify is a platform that offers merchants the infrastructure to build their own online stores, list their products, sell them and securely receive payments from their customers through one of the available payment gateways such as: Stripe, PayPal, Checkout, and others.

Shopify uses the highest safety standards for hosting online stores and receiving payments, and the checkout page where you enter your credit card data is protected with an SSL certificate that makes it protected against stealing your card info by someone else.

Make sure to check if the URL of the store, and especially the checkout page starts with HTTPS and not HTTP.

And regarding your personal contact information, and the products you receive, then it is a bit related to each Shopify-hosted store separately.

Shopify is not a marketplace like Amazon where Amazon has control over almost all the operation including product delivery and customer satisfaction, but rather, Shopify handles the technical side of hosting online stores and securely receiving payments.

But regarding the operations related to product shipping, delivery, quality, and customer satisfaction, these all are handled by the owner of each store, and not by Shopify itself.

In order to know if the money you pay to any online store, whether it was built on Shopify or any other platform, you need to do your due diligence and research the store a little bit in order to find out if it was trustworthy or not.

Here are some of the things you might check in order to know if a Shopify store is safe to buy from or not:

• Does it belong to well-known brand, merchant, or a seller that you know runs a reputable business.
• Do they offer easy ways to contact them even before making an order, preferably a phone number that is apparent on the home page or contact page.
• Are there the important pages on the store such as: privacy policy, disclaimers, about, contact, …etc.
• Are they clear about the delivery times upfront on the product page, home page, or delivery policy page.
• Is there a trustworthy online presence for the store on social media platforms, review sites, online directories, …etc.
• Is there a positive feedback about the store or brand on unbiased review sites, directories, and social media accounts, with a good number of reviewers that you feel cannot be faked.
• Do they offer a satisfaction guarantee, money back guarantee, refund policy, that you feel comfortable to deal with.
• Does the Shopify store look well-built, free from errors and grammatical mistakes, uses good product images, titles, and descriptions, or is it something that someone build overnight with the lowest quality standards.

These all can help you know if you can trust the people behind the store and if it was safe to buy from that particular Shopify store or not.

Also, you may choose to pay with PayPal if it was available as it adds another layer of security when it comes to your payment information, and it can might offer some help in getting your money back in case that you were scammed, or if you believe that the product doesn’t meet the description and the store owner refused to refund your money.

And at the same time, Shopify offers a way to report a Shopify store if you believe that it practices fraudulent behaviour, or if it didn’t deliver products with the promised quality, and didn’t accept to refund you.

Is Shopify Safe to Sell for Merchants?

Shopify follows the highest security standards when it comes to hosting ecom stores, selling products, and receiving payments from customers.

In addition to the SSL protection on the store pages and checkout page that protects the buyers’ information from being stolen by hackers, Shopify helps merchants detect and cancel orders that might be fraudulent through an algorithm that adopts machine learning, which detects orders or customers with suspicious behavior, and it marks these orders for your attention in order to review them before you approve them.

These order could lead to chargebacks and disputes, and might cause you problems with the payment gateways that might suspend your account and put you out of business.

Some of the red flags that cause orders to be labeled as fraudulent are:

• A mismatch between the billing and the shipping addresses.
• Multiple failed tries to pay with different cards.
• High value orders.
• Multiple orders to the same shipping address with different billing addresses.
• And so on.

This is one of the reasons why Shopify can be trusted to host your business on it.

You can check out this guide from Shopify, or watch the following video on how to deal with fraudulent orders in order to protect yourself.

Is Shopify Safe from Hackers?

As I mentioned earlier, when it comes to retrieving customers’ payment information, it is hard for hackers to steal this kind of information because customers enter their credit card details on an encrypted page with an SSL certificate.

And the payment information don’t get stored on the database of the Shopify store, as it gets handled by the payment gateway.

And while Shopify applies the highest standards in order to keep their platform secure and out of bugs that might help hackers get into sellers’ stores’ back-ends, it is still possible that someone might hack your PC and find their way to your Shopify store’s password, or might be able to guess the password if it was easy to guess.

That would make your store subject to being hacked, receiving or banking account changed, or making manual orders to different addresses that you might not notice, issuing refunds on your behalf, deleting different pages on your store, …etc.

Follow the general tips to protect your store from hackers, such as:

• Using strong passwords for both, your store and the email address associated with it, and change them regularly.
• Use HTTPS certificate for your domain name.
• Don’t login to your email or store from a device that you don’t own.
• Don’t make your passwords store in a place where they are easy to find by others.
• Don’t give lots of privileges to your teammates in case that you gave access to the store’s back-end.
• Have regular backups for the different content sections and store information in the form of CSV files.
• Don’t add lots of Shopify apps, use a low quality Shopify theme, or make lots of edits on the theme files.

Conclusion – Shopify Is Safe and Legit

Shopify is a safe platform to start your own ecommerce website and sell products if you were a merchant, and it is safe for customers to buy from a Shopify-hosted store when it comes to their payment and credit card information.

But customers need to pay attention to the store itself to find out if it was managed by someone who is trustworthy or not, and it is up to merchants to keep their login information protected from hackers.

I hope that might short article was helpful for you whether you were a customer who is concerned about the safety of buying from a Shopify store, or a merchant who is worried about the safety of selling on Shopify.

If you still need help or have any question about this subject, please, tell me in the comments’ section below, and I will do my best to help you out 🙂

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