buySAFE & HACKER SAFE in a Ground Breaking Announcement – Enabling Risk-Free eCommerce

buySAFE and ScanAlert, the provider of HACKER SAFE, issued a very important joint press release yesterday announcing a new strategic partnership between our two companies. As the release states, “the buySAFE/HACKER SAFE combination enables online merchants to address the two most prominent concerns among online shoppers -- merchant non-performance and data security assurance.”  This is really quite a groundbreaking event because by combining the two offerings, for the first time ever, truly comprehensive, virtually risk-free online shopping for internet users is enabled. The combined offering addresses all of the main trust threats online buyers are faced with and worried about. Please let me explain why… 

There are two main types of concerns that online users have when buying online – concerns over the security & privacy of their information and concerns over merchant trust & performance.  As shown in the following the chart, HACKER SAFE addresses roughly half of the concerns the typical shopper has and buySAFE addresses the other half.  The last area of concern which both solutions indirectly provide a consumer protections for is privacy (via ensuring a secure site and a trusted merchant). That said, TRUSTe is really the industry leader with regard to ensuring full privacy protection (TRUSTe is therefore also shown to reflect this). By bundling the HACKER SAFE and buySAFE offerings together so that every HACKER SAFE customer that qualifies for buySAFE can use buySAFE for free and so that every buySAFE merchant can now get deep discounts to use HACKER SAFE, it provides an exceptionally compelling offering for both merchants and shoppers.

There are very strong economic incentives for internet shopping to be completely trusted, reliable and risk-free (anything less than risk-free eCommerce is a major friction point that slows growth, reduces participation and triggers discounting that leads to markets for lemons) so it’s clearly the future of eCommerce. This announcement is major step forward toward realizing this vision of completely safe online shopping.