“Trust” is a very important element in a trading process, regardless by using the most traditional way or by applying E-commerce. Without having a trust between buyer and seller, a transaction will not be successful because they feel doubtful to each others. “Trust” is easier to be established in the traditional way of trading compared to using E-commerce as a trading medium. This is because the goods or services received at the time when the payment is made in the traditional manner, but with E-commerce, there is a time lag between the payment made and the receipts of goods. With the rapid evolution of technology, there is possible to embed the “trust” in E-commerce by having a Third Party Certification.

Third party certification, often known as Secure Socket Layer (SSL) is an encryption protocol that provides secure data transfer through Internet. Third party certificate is issued by only few bodies, known as licensed Certification Authority. The most common SSL that available in Malaysia are Verisign and MSCTrustgate. Both SSL comes in the form of digital certificate, digital signature, encryption, and decryption. Currently, Verisign had secured over 1 million web server worldwide.

Generally, SSL starts with the process of encryption on the information during online transaction. The SSL consists of a public key and a private key. The public key is used to encrypt information (perform when sender sent the information through internet) and the private key is used to decrypt it (perform when the receiver received the information from internet). Besides that, the SSL also contains unique, authenticated information about the certificate owner. Finally, when the information had been received by the receiver, authentication process will perform. During authentication process, the authenticated organization name is displayed and the address bar will turn green when an Extended Validation SSL Certificate is detected. If the information does not match or the certificate has expired, the browser will display an error message. For detail explanation on "how SSL works", click on "Trustgate" icon above.

With the implementation of Third Party Certification, it helps E-commerce businesses in generating higher revenue because there is higher “trust” being placed in the business transaction. In the perception of users who have the knowledge on Third Party Certification, they can perform any online transaction without any doubt. However, the group of user needs to have detail knowledge on how the Third Party certification works. For a large group of peoples who have limited or no knowledge on Third Party Certification, they will have a general perception on which they shouldn’t perform online transaction due to lack of “trust”.