A close second in terms of importance is the ability to secure your payments. Why do I say a close second, instead of the highest importance? The answer is simply this: if you wanted to ensure your payments don’t get hacked online, then you could always ask for bank transfers or some other offline form of payment, whereas there is no way you can maintain your site effectively without the use of some form of online admin tool.
The fundamental goal with respect to securing payments is to make the transmission of sensitive data (which occurs during the checkout stages of a purchase), as well as payment tracking after checkout using IPNs, undecipherable in the event that the transmission is intercepted. Luckily for us, this is the easiest thing in the world to do for the front end of the site, so let’s take a look at that first.