In the alphabet soup of technical abbreviations we encounter, having a PCI compliant shopping cart on your ecommerce website is one that will actually keep your financial reputation “out of the soup.” PCI stands for “Payment Card Industry,” and it’s usually followed by the letters “DSC” for “Data Security Standard”; hence “PCI DSS.”

PCI DSS sets the industry standards.

Actually PCI DSS is a list of rules governing all companies that process, transmit, or store credit/debit card information.  The standard came about in 2006 when the Payment Card Industry Security Standards Council (PCI SSC) began to manage the evolving payment card security with the goal of improving overall account security from the time the card is read until the transaction is completed. The PCI SSC is an independent body under the auspices of Visa, MasterCard, American Express, Discover and JCB.

PCI standards apply off line and on line.

All stores that accept credit cards and transmit cardholder data have to be PCI compliant as of 2010. The bank that handles your transaction validations will enforce those standards. Even if you only accept credit cards over the phone, PCI still applies. If you use a third-party ecommerce host, you are not exempt from PCI compliance, but doing so can cut down on your risk exposure in credit card applications.

Why bother?

If you run an ecommerce business, you need to pay attention to PCI DSS because:

  • Compliance means that your system is secure and customers can rely on your safeguarding their credit card information.
  • Increased customer trust translates into continuing confidence and repeat business.
  • Staying compliant makes you a part of worldwide effort in fighting credit/debit card data hacking and compromise.
  • Not being compliant could lead to the disaster  of negatively affecting your customers, your business reputation, losing sales and all the associated bad things like insurance claims, lawsuits, fines, etc.

So what’s a PCI-compliant shopping cart?

The shopping cart for ecommerce web sites is the area where the customer records and places the order for the goods. Since the shopping cart process includes entering credit/debit card data, it has to be PCI-compliant.

AbleCommerce closes the loop.

We have been a leader in ecommerce software since 1993. Our software has everything you need to run a profitable sales operation and it has the PCI-compliant shopping cart system you need. Contact us and download a free trial copy and check us out!