Donor seeing "Unsecure Site" when paying with American Express, help!

[Kcorrado]

A donor just called me livid.  We use Paypal through our websites to donate.  She was making an American Express donation and saw a message that the site was unsecure AFTER she had made the payment.  Naturally she is furious and alarmed.  Has anyone ever experienced this before?  Was the site really unsecure?

Thanks for any and all help!

[PayPal_Frank]

Hi Kcorrado,

Welcome to the community!  Most of the time an error message referring to an "unsecure" site is referencing whether or not the site is using SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) encryption.  You can tell if a site is using encryption if it has "https://" before their site URL.  Sites that do not use encryption have addresses that look like this "http://www." then the site name.  Notice there is no "s" after the "http".

I want to bring this up because PayPal always uses SSL encryption.  Our site will always have the "s".  Even if you go to http://www.paypal.com, we'll automatically switch it to an encrypted connection.

So why does this matter?

If your PayPal buttons or shopping cart is setup to send the customer back to your website and your website is not encrypted (https), most browsers will pop up a message that says the site is unsecure.  This can also happen if you have customized your PayPal checkout to include your logo at the top of the page.  If that logo is not hosted on a secure server, the customer's browser will pop up a message stating their are unsecure items on the page.

If this is caused by your logo, you can try hosting the image with http://www.sslpic.com/ which provides secure image hosting.  Another option is to contact your web hosting provider about getting an SSL certificate for your website.

This particular issue can be pretty confusing so I hope this helps! 🙂

- Frank