In our ongoing market research of ecommerce widget technology, we came across Tailgate Technologies, a company that’s been involved in the ecommerce widget space since 2007, only they call it ‘transactional banner advertising’, perhaps so as to make it more clear and appealing to publishers that this is in fact an alternative to traditional banner/text ads.
One of the interesting things about Tailgate is that they allow for a seamless transaction, meaning that you can perform the checkout process, including entering your credit card details, directly inside the widget so that you are not taken to an external site. This is the way that widgets should work because it makes it so much quicker to complete the transaction and easier for customers to understand what’s happening.
However scanning through the Techcrunch review of Tailgate one can see a vast number of negative comments in regards to the security implications of this. The main argument goes something like: “a scammer could set up a banner that looks similar to the Tailgate banner and thereby start a phishing operation to obtain credit card numbers”.
There are a couple of responses to this; firstly phishing exists almost everywhere on the internet with entire webpages being faked so as to convince the visitor that the site is the legitimate one. PayPal as well as numerous major banks have been subject to such phishing attacks. There seems no basis for arguing that a banner is any more effective or likely to fool users than other types of phishing attacks.
Secondly, from a user perspective, an ecommerce widget/banner is as trustworthy as the site that it is located on. For example if I am visiting a blog which I know well and which I trust, why would I assume that a widget/banner on this site is not equally as trustworthy as the site itself - after all the site’s operators have approved that widget/banner and placed it there themselves. There is no way that a phishing scammer can place anything on a website without the operators consent
Finally, if your credit card details are stolen and somebody bills your account wrongly, you are legally protected from this fraud and can call up your credit provider and inform them that you did not make this purchase. It’s then the responsibility of the seller to prove that they shipped the item to you. Credit card fraud is actually something which affects sellers much more than buyers, who are actually fully protected by default.
In conclusion, it’s true that shopping through widgets/banners is still so new that it will take some time for users to adopt it as a normal and trustworthy means for online shopping, but this should take nothing away from the fact that shopping through this new channel is as safe as through any traditional ecommerce website.
