Are you selling SSL certificates?

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By: James Koole on April 2nd, 2009
Posted in: OpenSRS Services
Tags: SSL Service
Comments: 2

A few weeks back, I blogged about the presentation that Bob Angus, from Verisign gave at WebhostingDay in Germany. Bob had some great tips for how to drive sales through SSL digital certificates.

For Resellers who are already selling SSL certificates through OpenSRS, there was some great information that you can use to drive sales in your customer base. For Resellers not selling SSL certificates yet, have a look at that post and then ask yourself why you haven’t offered them to your customers yet.

What an SSL Certificate Does

You may be under the impression that SSL certificates are only for ecommerce sites, or banks and your customers aren’t Bank of America or eBay so you don’t need to offer SSL certificates. That kind of thinking can lead to you overlooking a huge potential market for SSL certificates that’s just waiting to be tapped.

SSL certificates really do two things:

• First, an SSL certificate provides security by encrypting the data between the browser and the web server. Obviously, data encryption is important for financial transactions or other situations where websites are requesting sensitive data from visitors. Without that SSL certificate, and the little lock icon in the browser, most web surfers won’t provide that data.
• Second, SSL also provides identity verification, primarily through the new Extended Validation (EV) certificates. You’ve probably seen EV in action – sites with an EV certificate will cause the address bar on Firefox, or IE to turn green, and you are able to view information about the website that will help you to confirm that you are dealing with who you think you are dealing with. I’ve grabbed a screenshot of GeoTrust’s EV certificate in action on Firefox that’s shown above.

Applications Where Encryption Matters

Think about that first use for SSL certificates for a minute – encrypting and protecting data – and then start thinking about all the cases where you, and especially your customers, might want to have an encrypted connection between the browser and the server. I’m thinking about web forums, blogging platforms, webmail, web server control panels, company intranets, corporate wikis, VPNs, customer portals, etc.

The list of potential applications for SSL certificates is nearly endless. Now ask yourself this: “Do my customers do any of those things?” The answer is most likely, “Yes.” Now ask yourself again “Why haven’t I offered them SSL certificates yet?”

By the way, you’ll want to keep an eye on the blog over the next few weeks. We’ll be talking a bit more about SSL certificates and why now might be a very good time to start selling through OpenSRS if you aren’t already.