Online Shoppers Start Caring for Your Privacy Now

Suppose you have 1 lac as savings in your account and a message of your bank reaches to you: “An amount of Rs.99,999 has been debited from your account number XXXX1234 on account of payment to Flipkart using XYZ Bank NetBanking”.  You will immediately call the customer care of Flipkart and tell them: “I only bought a pen drive worth of 500 that too a month ago” and the customer care representative replies: “We are extremely sorry Sir, but it seems somehow website was displaying previously entered credentials toady for past half hour. We have shut down the website and we are trying to solve the issue”.  There after you can make a lot of clamor but your bank account will still show Re 1 as the total balance.

Online privacy in e-commerce is as important as bricks in a building. Without that, the whole business will return to dust. And privacy policies are the frameworks for security and privacy of the data of customers. It’s easy to constitute the policies based on the compliance required by consumer forums and the government. But that won’t ensure customer’s satisfaction.

To maintain customer relationships, following are six tips that will help you build your policies in a much more effective and strong way:

Indistinct point of contacts:

Assign the responsibility of policies to a team or an individual. In this way there will be only one point of contact which will be distinct and which will research and develop the privacy policies need by your e-business by behaving as your customers.

Research and develop:

For the success of your privacy policies, go through the privacy policies of the big shot e-commerce business such as eBay, Myntra, etc. Understand it thoroughly and accordingly think over it so that you can utilize their points in developing privacy policies of your business.

Inspection of the policies:

After forming the base for your policies, think from both owner and customer’s point of view. Being the owner of the site what kind of data will you be requiring to serve your business and as a customer what will be severity of data that you’ll be providing to the site in terms of security.  As an owner you also need to classify the data that you might be sharing with third parties when needed. For example: the email system that will be sending confirmation message to user after a purchase or for alerts or for promoting your business.

Finalizing the policies:

You are done with the research and now you have all information you need to build a strong policy statement. For the framework you can use a policy generator and then draft the policy statements according to the information collected in research in an organized format with sections and links to the respective document wherever necessary. But keep in mind that too many technical terms may throw off your customer.

Project it strong visually:

Wherever necessary, give a link of your privacy policies on the site so that the customer can access them anytime and feel secure enough to use your site in terms of the protection of their data. Placement of the link of privacy policies ad your policy statements should exhibit that their data will be handled with utmost care.

Maintain and modernize:

With changing technologies and customer’s expectation, it is very important that along with the site the policy statements are updated periodically and communicated to the customer. It reflects hardly upon the data practices of your team and site and makes sure that you are up to date when it comes handling the customer’s data.