International eCommerce and GDPR Compliance

International eCommerce and GDPR Compliance

GDPR, the General Data Protection Regulation, is a law that regulates data protection and piracy. Naturally, International eCommerce has to comply with GDPR or the Denner general data protection regulation. In simple terms, if a site stores user information, it must give the user an opportunity to opt-out from the capturing and saving of their data.

Essentially, this is what the law regulates. A site must convey to the user that it is going to store their information in simple terms. Using plain language is essential as the user needs to be able to understand how you will use their data. A better way to look at it is in the form of the four W’s:

• What is collected?
• Why is it collected? (or the purpose of storing that data)
• Where does it get stored?
• Will it get shared?

It is a regulation governed by the European Union. So, from a business perspective, it is vital to make sure that your international commerce platform has the capability of complying with GDPR. We highly suggest that you optimize your website in a way to match the GDPR compliance. Of course, it can be a hectic task. A lot of the data getting collected on an international eCommerce platform is extensive. So, we are going to narrow down what you exactly need to do to optimize your site.

Managing your Third-Party Platforms

Keeping track of all the information stored on your website is not a simple task. We understand that it is not all laid out and ready-made. Therefore, working with an analytics platform can be very beneficial in this case. You might have a chat tool. You may be using some remarketing or retargeting advertising. In many cases, there are other additional analytics tools as well that you can set up on your site.

Now, all of these are going to be saving and storing data about that end user. The site itself is going to be collecting and storing data about users and using that typically for marketing purposes. It will conduct analytics and send transactional marketing to that particular user based on their interactions on the site. So, you need to disclose all these things in plain language on your site. The user should be able to opt-out at any time. The data purged from the system should not have any cost to the user. There should also be no diminishment to the core functionality of the application.

Notifying Users with Updates in Terms

There is a lot of convenience and value that the end-user gets by having their information stored. Users will prefer to go ahead and grant access to the usage of data in most cases. If done so, you need to be transparent with your users. You need to present all your terms in plain language and notify users when there is any update to them. It makes sense to have an internal process for updating and revising terms. This helps in providing notifications to the user based on changes to the application's functionality.

So, if you say, change your analytics firm, or if you change marketing strategies, and you add different scripting to the site, it will change what user-data will get saved. You must notify your users about these changes.

Determining how to consistently and continuously update that list of items can be challenging. Keep in mind that the goal is not to remove the business's ability to compete by having so much overhead. The goal is to complete the GDPR compliance. You can easily achieve it by keeping your users informed.

Managing Account Data

A user inputs a lot of data as they go through the registration till finally checking out. That data typically would be saved into an account or a user record. The user should have the ability not to save that data and still be able to utilize the site. From an international eCommerce perspective, we suggest you keep track of such things. They can be very challenging and expensive to deal with from a legal perspective. You have to plan out and work on these things upfront. Especially the component of being able to remove or purge data upon request and not diminish on-site functionality. If you haven't built that in, you haven't planned for that upfront. Dealing with it later can be quite a challenge.

Non-intrusive Data Security

The last thing that we will point out is that the data storage needs to be secure in addition to the overall application as well. So ultimately, you are looking at something that should be beneficial anyway to the business with GDPR. Being transparent is going to be helpful for users so that they are comfortable. They will see the business as a credible website. But we also don't want to be annoying. We don't want to get in the way of a user browsing the sites. We want to have a very subtle yet clear and expandable system of messaging for the users. The user should be able to dig into more detail if they'd like.

Once again, with international eCommerce, the documentation, the language, will also need to be accurately translated to a user. So that based on the language selected in a specific region or country, the actual terminology should be readable by the end-user that's visiting the site.

Clarity International eCommerce Experts

We would encourage you to think about as you look at requirements like GDPR is what the long-term goals and needs of your international eCommerce platform are. If they involve continuing to scale and operate in the European Union countries, then we strongly encourage you to put the time in to understand GDPR Compliance. It will not only bring long-term benefits but smoothen out your on-site experience as well. Transparency will allow you to cultivate a loyal user-base that will ultimately be very beneficial to your business.