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Every year, retailers and e-commerce brands are increasingly introducing social commerce and personalization tools that improve the customer experience, but as shopping becomes more digital, that does come with some downsides.
- Social media platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and Pinterest are becoming increasingly more critical to the shopping experience, but integrating these platforms into commerce operations requires the use of programming interfaces (APIs), which are susceptible to hacking.
- Despite the increased number of attacks, a survey from security platform Noname Security found that 76% of retail and e-commerce respondents report having a full API inventory. Also, only 39% said they know which APIs return sensitive data, while 24% admitted to only having a partial view of inventory.
- Still, it’s better than 2022, when two-thirds (67%) of respondents reported a lack of visibility and only a third having a full inventory of APIs and knowing which returned sensitive data.
“Clearly, APIs have become the default connectivity and data exchange method within modern e-commerce and will continue to be so in the future,” the report read. “Looking ahead, securing APIs from both a pre-production and post-production perspective is paramount to securely operating in our e-commerce world.”
And a lack of security has major downstream implications: Half of retail and e-commerce respondents said customers lost confidence in them and churned their accounts, while 47% reported a dropoff in productivity as a result.
It’s safe to say that these concerns are now top of mind, given that more than three-quarters (77%) say API security is a bigger priority than it was a year ago. Half of respondents now say it is a requirement, and 50% of them also said it enables business operations.