- Technology
- February 12, 2014
- by Alex O'Byrne
- 2 minute read
As online transactions become more common, many business banks in the UK are insisting on stricter security. One of these requirements could be that your payment gateway supports 3D secure.
As well as PCI compliance, another common stumbling block for checkout security is 3D secure.
What is 3D secure?
You've probably experienced Verified by Visa and MasterCard SecureCode whilst shopping online - these are implementations of 3D Secure. When you pay on a checkout that supports 3D secure, you are directed to your bank after entering your payment details, you are then asked to enter a password that you set the first time you use 3D secure.
This adds a second layer of security beyond knowing the credit card numbers printed on the card, such as the three digit security code, so a thief using a stolen or copied card would still struggle to make a payment using it. This reduces the fraud risk for your store significantly as your password is a secret piece of information that you only you should know.
Which Shopify payment gateways support it?
Shopify has a secure and PCI compliant checkout that takes away a lot of security concerns. However, it doesn't support 3D secure when using integrated payment gateways. So if your store checkout looks fully customised to your theme and is running on checkout.shopify.com, you can't use 3D secure. The good news is that currently SagePay and WorldPay support 3D Secure. They are able to do this because these are two of the only payment gateways (other than PayPal) that take you away from the Shopify checkout to their own servers to finish checkout. You can still theme and customise the payment page using the payment gateway configuration screens.
Conclusion
We hope that helps you understand 3D secure, if you have any further questions please get in touch.
Authors
Alex O'Byrne
Alex is Co-founder at We Make Websites, the go-to Shopify agency for global commerce. We Make Websites design, develop and optimise e-commerce websites for the fastest growing brands on the planet, with teams in London and New York. Alex is an international speaker on ecommerce, brand and business growth.
