Yahoo! Store Users: SSL Servers are Moving

Yahoo! Merchant Solutions, a leading ecommerce provider, is migrating its secure socket layer (SSL) certificates to new servers, improving their system’s flexibility, but forcing some e-retailers to make changes to their stores before an October 15 deadline to avoid cart errors.

The SSL protocol—as many retailers know—is the industry standard for safe ecommerce transactions, encrypting personal data like an email address or a credit card number to prevent cyber hoodlums and virtual identity thieves from stealing customer information. SSL certificates reside on secure web servers where they encrypt data and offer a store’s proof of ownership. Pages secured with this protocol often bare a padlock icon in the address bar or on the lower right hand corner of the browser.

Yahoo! has been moving its SSL certificates for the past few months, but on October 15 the company will stop supporting older SSL web addresses. Yahoo! stores that used SSL-protected directories or sub-directories will have to change the target URL for some files or forms or their customers will get a mismatched security certificate error.

According to Yahoo!, a store owner must update their links if all the following conditions are true:

• A store owner has “uploaded images, files, or scripts to an SSL-protected directory” in their Yahoo! Web Hosting account.
• Referenced those files with a shopping cart, checkout process, or “a script that provides real-time shipping and tax rates.”
• And the links to the referenced files “include the old secure web address,” that looks like: https://s.p2.hostingprod.com@somedomain.com

New Yahoo! SSL certificate URLs take the form: https://p2.secure.hostingprod.com/@somedomain.com.

To update a store the retailer must locate the old URLs in their site, and manually change the target URL. More information about Yahoo! SSL certificates can be found here.