EV SSL Certificate for Sole Proprietorship Business

Itself EV SSL Certificate is a complex topic. Sole proprietorship business system designed mainly to run brick-and-mortar business with minimal cost, minimal paperwork. A sole proprietorship is good for making various websites a real entity beyond the domain name. But sole proprietorship itself just a kind of link of a name with an individual. Regulations around Sole Proprietorship varies from country to country but usually, they are what we mentioned – for the shops. The CA does issue EV certificates to Sole Proprietorship entities, although they have a slightly round-about method to validate the entity.

At present, many of the shops want to have an online entity with own website, social media accounts. There is a definite push towards encryption on the web and as a consequence, the topic of SSL certificates comes up. Unfortunately, most of the traditional shop owners are not well aware of various schemes on the internet. EV certificates, which stands for Extended Validation certificates, usually have a green indicator in the address bar with the name of the entity. If you point your browser towards websites such as Twitter, IBM you’ll notice that the browser address pane is displaying the extra information about the business name, such as “Twitter Inc [US]”.

That much what EV certificates returns for the hefty cost from $75/year to over $300/year. The website operators with EV certificates are well aware of the fact and they do use it as a marketing tool. Paying the extra, you are forcing the browsers to read your company’s name with location. The “advertisement” actually works as commonly the webpages load lags behind it by a few seconds. Unfortunate that “advertisement” does not fully work in newer browsers and mobile browsers. Few of the professional blogs tried EV SSL. Marketing (lack of better terminology) via EV SSL only works on desktop, not on mobile devices. Presently usage of mobile devices is growing and retaining that segment is not easy.

(Illustration is by LeaderSSL)

The claim of the sellers around more security is not fully wrong. With an EV certificate, the browser will not skip the revocation check and that is how if you mark an incidence of certificate loss followed by abuse, the action from the CA will be prompt to block such abuse. At least, this feature today is no more super-exciting. We have too many ways to prevent certificate abuse including using Certificate Transparency. You can probably forget about the promise of coverage of asset. Coverage of $10,00,000 is not exactly related to your web assets but it is related to the transaction frauds. Your bank probably covers it.

Now, the expenditure of $300/year is not much for Amazon, Twitter, IBM etc companies. They are getting far better marketing at a cheap cost. But the expenditure does matter to a business earning mere $2000/month.

We would suggest investing that money behind social media ads, Google AdWords like PPC, page-speed optimization and mobile application. Free Let’s Encrypt will serve the purpose for the most. Remaining can use $7 to $10 DV SSL certificate for warranted wider device compatibility.