Cybersecurity Threats and Mitigation Strategies in Cloud-Based Retail and E-Commerce Platforms: A Systematic Literature Review

Retail and e-commerce in the cloud have driven modern digital commerce, encompassing online stores, mobile payments, marketplace participation, logistics, customer analytics, real-time payment services, and more. This transformation has introduced additional cybersecurity challenges across websites, mobile applications, APIs, seller dashboards, cloud storage, customer databases, payment workflows, third-party integrations, and identity systems. This paper systematically highlights cybersecurity threats and corresponding mitigation strategies affecting cloud-based retail and e-commerce platforms. The methodology involved a qualitative, systematic literature review using PRISMA principles and a Parsifal-managed review process. The search covered seven electronic sources and yielded 1,340 records. Of these, 102 full-text studies were considered for inclusion, and the final synthesis included 35 peer-reviewed journal articles and conference papers published from 2021 to 2026. The results indicate that phishing, account takeover, credential stuffing, cloud misconfiguration, insecure APIs, payment fraud, fake listings, insider misuse, malware, ransomware, distributed denial-of-service attacks, data leakage, bot abuse, business-logic abuse, and supply-chain compromise are the most significant threats. Nigerian e-commerce platforms need to focus more on trust-building strategies, scam prevention, data protection maturity, payment confidence, identity security, and early incident response, while global platforms should adopt a scalable Zero Trust strategy, AI-assisted detection, seller ecosystem governance, API security, privacy engineering, and supply-chain resilience. The research outlines a cyber-resilience approach framed by NIST CSF 2.0 functions, structured around them, and aligned with ISO/IEC 27001:2022 controls without exception.

Cloud security, e-commerce cybersecurity, NIST CSF 2.0, ISO/IEC 27001:2022, Zero Trust Architecture, AI-driven threat detection, Nigerian e-commerce, online retail security.

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