In the era of digitalization, there’s no doubt the online world has become a central piece of the average person’s life. From healthcare to financial services, we see new players coming up with innovative solutions all the time, and the E-commerce industry is no different.

With growing customer expectations, and in an extremely competitive landscape, E-commerce retailers are actively trying to retain their customer’s interest. But because people keep having shorter and shorter attention spans online, that’s not an easy task. There’s a significant amount of work involved from retailers to optimize their website pages so that they can maximize their conversion rates.

Despite this big push to stand out from the competition and to provide a great user experience, E-commerce retailers still have to deal with other threats. Amongst those, comes an attack called Customer Journey Hijacking – which consists of cyber attackers or even competing companies actively trying to target E-commerce customers while they visit other E-commerce websites.

What does a Customer Journey Hijacking attack look like?

When the user is browsing an e-commerce website, they will typically be shown a price comparison pop-up, a coupon code, or anything similar directly on the page. Then, if the user clicks on any of those, they will be directed to a competitor website, abandoning the website they were browsing.

What are the consequences of a Customer Journey Hijacking attack?

These attacks directly impact conversion rates by hurting the sales volume of the affected websites. In fact, up to 5% of shopping sessions are affected by Customer Journey Hijacking - which, in such a demanding time as is the case with the holiday season, can represent quite a significant loss of revenue.

How does a Customer Journey Hijacking attack happen?

Behind the curtains, these attacks require changing the interface that is shown to the end-user - so, it requires gaining access to the website. But how? Well, because of the way websites and browsers behave, accessing and changing the contents of a webpage (Web page tampering) is perfectly feasible.

Attackers typically rely on browser extensions. This happens simply because browser extensions are often given full permissions to read and change all the data on all the websites that the user visits.

How to prevent a Customer Journey Hijacking attack?

Preventing customer Journey Hijacking requires a solution capable of detecting and blocking hijacking attempts in real-time. This is the case with Jscrambler Webpage Integrity (WPI), which detects and blocks Customer Journey Hijacking in real-time regardless of how the attack is deployed.

In practice, this means that WPI runs in every single user session and cross-checks various information sources, including resources that are loaded to the page, DOM changes, and code poisoning. Then, once WPI detects a hijacking attempt, it blocks it using a powerful rules engine, preventing the attack from actually unfolding. As a result, WPI effectively mitigates all customer journey hijacking attempts and directly results in an increase in conversion rates and sales.

To check if your website is being impacted by these hijacking attacks, request our free website security audit. It includes an overview of your website’s exposure to this threat and detailed security insights you can share with your security team.