Most people envisioned their orders flying through the ether, dodging rogue robot programs waiting to steal their data. In reality, orders travel by phone line, right from the ordering computer to the server holding the merchant's web page. During this trip, information is no more subject to interception than your phone calls. In any event, that is now changing at an incredible rate. The Problem arises with the implementation of order processing programs.
Many programs create customer databases on the server.
This can facilitate automated order processing, and relieve the merchant from the necessity of turning his or her computer into a 24 hour virtual web server, but it can also create a security hole. Credit card information can be found and downloaded by hackers, often even inexperienced ones. That cost is often not justifiable for a small business. The Encrypted Order Transfer system, available here, accepts customer orders through a form interface, double encrypts the sensitive data, and sends the order to the merchant by the WWW Email Gateway, as well as a confirmation to the customer. The merchant then has access to a private web page which will decrypt the coded material, and the order is processed normally.