When I was a little boy, my dad and I would often walk to a busy, family-owned electronics store on the corner of Devon and Western Avenues.
It was called International Video and Electronics, and you could buy anything there: They carried telephones and televisions, microphones and microwaves.
The 3,000-square-foot store stood in that immigrant neighborhood from 1979 to 2000.
“At the time, most of our customers were people who were sending stuff back to their families,” said company CEO Nirav Shah, 25. “They had just migrated to the U.S. and their family wanted a TV they couldn’t get back home in Poland or Ukraine or India.”
Shah, 25, started working at the store, which his father started, in 1999.
As a child of the Internet economy, it wasn’t long before International Video and Electronics had an e-commerce Web site.
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And when the same TVs his customers bought sent to their families overseas suddenly became available overseas, the family shifted from bricks and mortar to concentrate on the Web site.
Today, Shah manages two Web sites from his 7,000-square-foot Elk Grove Village warehouse.
RegionCodeFreeDVD.com specializes in DVD players that can handle local as well as internationally made DVDs. Various world regions use different technologies to write their DVDs, which makes European-made discs, for example, incompatible with U.S. players.
Like unlocked cell phones that can be used on any wireless carrier’s network, Shah sells DVD player that play discs from anywhere.
The other site, 220-Electronics.com, focuses on internationally compatible televisions, VCRs and voltage converters, in addition to DVD players.
Together, these two sites average about 650 visitors per day, and for years converted about 12 percent of the visitors into customers.
But about six months ago, Shah was contacted by an Atlanta-based company called ControlScan Inc. (www.controlscan.com).
ControlScan offered to protect Shah’s sites from hackers, to close any open doors, and to secure customers’ private information and credit card numbers.
“We’re a superhacker,” said Aaron Biddar, ControlScan’s president. “We look at any doors anyone can use to gain access to your Web site and close them.”
Once secured, they would monitor the site and continue plugging new vulnerabilities as they came up.
“I was a bit skeptical at first,” Shah recalled. “They contacted me, and I had never heard of them. But it was a whole array of products. And they offered a range of seals.”
The “seals” are small rectangular badges aimed at reassuring jittery Internet shoppers.
ControlScan licenses four seals to its customers. Among them, there is a “Verified Secure” seal, and an “ID Theft Protected” seal.
“The No. 1 concern of all online shoppers, according to the FTC, is ID theft,” Biddar said. “We give our merchants the tools to alleviate those concerns and increase their online sales.”
Shah hired the company.
ControlScan reviewed the Web sites against its list of known vulnerabilities.
Similar to definitions for viruses maintained by companies like Symantec, the list of Web site vulnerabilities is updated daily. At the time of this writing, there were 11,804 such vulnerabilities in ControlScan’s database.
Of them, 202 have been discovered in the last 30 days.
You can see ControlScan’s list of vulnerabilities at https://my.controlscan.com/threats.
Once discovered, many of the problems can be fixed quickly.
“A lot of it can be done remotely,” Biddar explained. “Many times we work on your behalf with your Web host to patch its software or close an open port. The fixes are very easy, and we take care of them.”
ControlScan also had Shah update his privacy policy to bring it up to date with governmental regulations.
And then he got his seals. Shah displays all four of ControlScan’s safety symbols.
“Initially, I did it to increase customer confidence when they’re shopping us,” he said. “To show them the site is hacker-proof. Really, it’s peace of mind for our customers. They’ve never heard of us, and they see these logos saying, `This company seems legit.'”
Did customers respond with their wallets?
Since adding the seals to his Web sites, Shah’s conversion rates have increased from 12 percent to between 15 and 20 percent. “I think it paid for itself in the first couple of weeks,” Shah said with a laugh.
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ControlScan offers two packages, for between about $1,300 and about $1,500 per year. The 20-person company, which launched in April 2005, secures about 19,000 Web sites.
“I have people who, anytime a new vulnerability is added to our database, all they do all day long is make sure our clients are brought up to speed and updated,” Biddar said.
That’s huge peace of mind for Shah. And his customers.
“It has really increased our customers’ confidence,” he said. “They even call us less. A lot of people who used to call us to place orders just do it online now.”
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Alex L. Goldfayn is host of “The Technology Tailor Show” on WGN-AM 720 on Saturdays from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m.