"Combining enhanced security information with price, user ratings, and merchant reviews helps online shoppers make more informed and trusted buying decisions," said Joe Lazarus, Director of Marketing for Yahoo! Shopping.

"With the Hacker Safe trustmark included in Yahoo! Shopping listings, consumers can easily identify retailers that have taken additional steps to safeguard customer data."

Industry research has shown that security is one of three factors consumers consider before making a purchase. Besides pricing and product availability, security concerns heavily influence online decisions from using a shopping engine to find products or directly going to a retailer’s site. For many shoppers trust is more important than pricing when it comes to making a purchasing decision.

"Our testing in the past two years has consistently shown that visitors react very positively to the Hacker Safe trustmark on our site," said Jay Greenberg, Ecommerce Marketing Manager, Franklin Electronic Publishers.

"Now that we’re able to promote our certified security to consumers as they use shopping engines to find products, we’re looking forward to standing out more in the crowd, generating more shopping clicks, and delivering an even higher boost to our bottom line."

“Online shoppers . . . are taking more than half a day longer before making a buying decision and completing a transaction, according to a report by ScanAlert, a security-certification company in [the] Bay Area that analyzed 2.6 million online sales executed on 470 Web sites from May 2005 to May 2007,” states CNET’s Miriam Olsson.

“Since May 2005, the average time between a consumer’s first visit to a Web site and an actual purchase increased from 19 to 34 hours, according to the report.  One fourth of the shoppers took more than three days to decide what to buy, and one fifth took more than a week,” she continues.

The sheer number of sales that ScanAlert monitored, in addition to the time span in which the study was conducted, should make this data conclusive.

What’s it mean, then?  You probably already guessed, but online consumers appear to be doing more comparison shopping than ever before; they’re presumably making better choices and saving more money, as well.  Slow and steady wins the race and safeguards the wallet.

Forty five percent of sites had serious database vulnerability such as SQL Injection and fifty percent had Cross Site Scripting vulnerabilities. SQL Injection is a type of software vulnerability that allows hackers to penetrate databases to steal private information used for fraud and identity theft.

When it comes to which online retailers are most vulnerable to attacks they all have flaws that can be exploited by hackers.