Privacy Concerns For Used Car Dealerships With Online Credit Apps

Collecting personally identifiable information such as for instance SSN, DOB, address, etc. from your web visitors and prospects online has it own set of challenges and considerations. The last thing you as a brand new or used car dealer needs is to have certainly one of your web visitors fall victim to spot theft from filling out your credit app. Not merely have you got a moral obligation to guard this information oftentimes you might also need legal obligations you need to consider.

First, I want to say that I am not advocating the abolition of online credit applications, as a matter of fact Personally i think taking credit apps online can make selling cars ssndob so faster and easier. Many dealers have a protected credit app on their website, or at the very least that's what they were "sold" by their website solutions provider. In reality several services give you only a shared credit application that's not located within your website. The causes because of this are many, first of all it is more expensive to have your own SSL site certificate and in the event that you new to the method can be quite a real pain in the butt to setup on your webserver.

For instance if your website is StevenSellsUsedCars.com many providers go the'cheap way'and provide access to their secure app which can be something such as [https://www.ISellWebsites.com/creditapp.php?dealer=steven]. While this really is technically a'secure app'from the front-end (we will cover back-end later), the perception to the customers is they have left *your* site and gone somewhere else. This leaves the client wondering "Why am I not at StevenSellsUsedCars.com anymore? Who's this ISellWebsites.com guy? Can I trust them? Did this site get hi-jacked? Is my information safe?" In an occasion where ID theft is the hot topic on all the neighborhood evening news stations, folks are scared about giving out their personally identifiable information to sources they don't trust. This bit of doubt you've placed in this perspective customer's mind might have set you back a purchase, when he returned to Google and found your competitor's website that had a better application.

Now that individuals have covered the front-end now lets look at how the info is stored and retrieved in the back-end. You'd not believe how many dealerships I have now been to and had the dealer show me his email inbox. They are filled up with credit apps email in their mind in non-encrypted'plain-text '; willing to be stolen with a hacker as well as just a casual bystander. Think about it for a minute and it doesn't take being a very skilled uber-hacker to comprehend the implications. If you are going to encrypt the info from the user when he fills out the application, shouldn't you keep it encrypted through the entire entire process? Who within their right mind would think it is logical to send this information in plain text in an email? Sadly most website solution providers in the marketplace today do exactly this.