Do you really know how to prepare your online store for GDPR?

GDPR has been quite a hot topic lately and it gets only hotter as we get closer to 25th of May, 2018 (the day when GDPR comes in force). It is safe to say that the main reason for that is the high penalties that will be applied — Article 83 of the GDPR provides details of the administrative fines. There are two tiers of fines. The first is up to €10 million or 2% of the annual global turnover of the previous year, whichever is higher. The second is up to €20 million or 4% of the annual turnover of the previous year, whichever is higher.

But what does it have to do with your online store? Literally, everything and GDPR affects nearly all the online stores around the world. To make it short — If you store any European visitor information that you don’t need for legal reasons (which you most likely do), you are affected by the regulation. That means, even if you have an online store in the US and a European customer can register — you are affected.

How it can turn into a chaos for you as an online store owner

It’s pretty easy to lose the track on things here because you might receive a lot of requests to provide customer detail exports and similar and you might not meet the deadlines if you don’t know where and how to get all information. On top of that, there are many other things that are forbidden by GDPR (for example, pre-ticked checkboxes for email subscriptions).

That’s not quite all, there are more things to add — for example, if you employ European citizens, you need to comply also for your employees. Meaning that all European citizen data you have needs to be protected and you will need to able to prove that you have taken all the necessary steps to do that.

How to handle this

Well, for some it might be very obvious — just hire someone who will help you to get prepared to do this. There are many things that just cannot be done by the store owner personally or can be done only in a very stressful way, so to keep your sleep at night, it’s better to find someone who is friends with both e-commerce and GDPR regulations — someone who knows how it works and what you need.

What I mean is, we all get that GDPR is confusing and it can make your company go bankrupt if you don’t follow the rules, but does anyone actually knows what you need to do to avoid the day when you get a paper that tells that you have 3 billion euro penalty to pay?

Also, can you imagine what will happen when the regulation will come in force and EU customers will start to bombard your client support with emails and calls to get information about the data you have and will ask you delete them? Remember, you have only 8 days to do that.

How we can help you

A lot of law companies may offer you help to get ready for GDPR which is nice, but what about the technical part? There are many technically complex things that should be done for the 25th May and Magebit can help you out here.

To keep your sleep at night, we offer to do an audit of your online store to get ready and technical solutions that will keep your client support’s job undisturbed when GDPR comes in force.