ASI Upgrades ESP Websites To Meet Latest Security Standards

TREVOSE, PA – May 2, 2018 – The Advertising Specialty Institute® (ASI) today announced it has upgraded ESP Websites™ to meet the latest security standards with a free, safe, compliant SSL web security certificate, ahead of Google’s July deadline.

This summer, Google Chrome will flag websites missing an SSL certificate as “not secure,” which will impact a company’s search results ranking. Unlike other providers in the promotional products industry, all ESP Websites with an URL ending with espwebsite.com already come with a free SSL Certificate, so ASI customer sites are secure from the start and in compliance with the very latest web security demands – no upgrade necessary.

“As the industry leader in web-based business solutions, ASI takes website security across our entire platform very seriously, with credit card information already SSL-protected for all our customers’ websites, regardless of how basic or customized the site,” said Armughan Rafat, executive vice president and chief technology officer for the ASI family of companies.

“Full-site SSL compliance is the best way to secure data and protect businesses while making the web safer for everyone,” said Rafat. “While some service providers in the industry are requiring their customers to upgrade to be compliant, ASI is making compliance as easy and automatic as possible for our clients to help ensure that all data passing through their website remains private and secure.”

ESP Websites deliver a world-class shopping experience, with the search field on a customer’s website pulling from ESP®, the number-one business platform in the industry, allowing customers to search and buy any product directly from a company’s ESP Website.

URL addresses that start with HTTPS mean data between a visitor’s browser and a website is sent through a secured connection that’s encrypted by what’s called Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), a security method that helps protect the transfer of sensitive information, such as credit card numbers, passwords and usernames, Social Security numbers and more.

If an ESP Website is on a custom domain, ASI customers need to buy an SSL Certificate by July to make that domain secure and ensure Google search rankings aren’t affected. For a nominal handling fee of $50 a year, ASI offers any company with a custom domain an SSL certificate, which is at least a third less than the cost charged by other vendors.

Even if a company has a custom domain, the portion of its website where visitors purchase products is still the secure espwebsite.com domain, meaning a visitors’ shopping info is secure, while the rest of the site is not. ASI will not charge customers who wish to move their custom domain to an already secure ESP Website.

The benefits of an SSL certificate include:

• Activated HTTPS and visible green padlock icon proving security
• Increased rank in search engines
• Compliance with PCI standards
• Encryption of sensitive data
• Strengthened brand identity

ASI members with an ESP Website in a private domain who want to learn more about how to set up an SSL Certificate should click here. To learn more about ESP Websites, click here.

The ESP platform is modernizing the industry by directly connecting suppliers and distributors, simplifying the sales process and cutting time-consuming steps between searching and shipping. Further, ESP is the first business platform to display both current inventory and future availability in real time. Buyers and prospects viewing distributor websites hosted on ESP can quickly and easily place an order, calculate the costs in real time and hit ‘send,’ allowing a distributor to review it in minutes and instantly transmit it to a supplier.

For more information about ESP Websites, please contact Matt Goldfarb, ASI’s executive director of technical product support, at support@asicentral.com.

About ASI
The Advertising Specialty Institute (ASI®) serves a network of 23,500 suppliers, distributors and decorators in the $23.6 billion promotional products industry. ASI’s flagship product, the technology platform ESP®, manages the industry’s entire supply and marketing chain. ASI also produces award-winning digital and print content, live events and educational programs that enable companies in 55 countries to be more efficient, productive and profitable. ASI’s Counselor® magazine provides the most authoritative business content in the industry, and the ASI Certification Program features 500+ live and online education courses for over 40,000 professionals. The company, family owned and operated since 1962, is proud to have been consistently ranked among the “Best Places to Work” in Philadelphia and Bucks County, PA. For more info: www.asicentral.com.