PCI compliance
PCI compliance is a legal requirement for any business that handles payment card data. Evolve ensures all our clients become, and remain fully PCI compliant for their protection.
Fraud and concerns over data privacy are the single largest impediment to online conversion and sales.
To combat fraud and data loss Payment Card Industry (PCI) compliance was setup by Mastercard, Visa and JCB to ensure all businesses who collect, store or transfer payment card details handle the data to strict standards for fraud prevention purposes.
Becoming PCI compliant
The following are some of the most important areas to ensure PCI Compliance for your ecommerce store:
- Separate IP address and a security certificate (SSL Certificate)
A security certificate encrypts the data sent between your customers computers and your websites server to ensure the data isn't intercepted. It's relatively easy to intercept unsecure data, and when payment card details are being transmitted you can see the importance of securing this data. - Dedicated hosting
Shared hosting is cheap and suitable for most normal websites, but when it comes to ecommerce websites the security risks will ensure you quickly fail PCI Compliance. To ensure full PCI Compliance dedicated hosting is your only choice. Evolve provides PCI Compliant hosting as part of our hosting services. - PCI Compliant payment processing
Taking card details on your website and storing them in your own database is incredibly risky and only the largest, most secure businesses should be doing this. For the rest of us a PCI Compliant payment service is the key to ensuring your business is covered. As part of our service Evolve give you all the options available to you.
PCI fines - the teeth of PCI-DSS compliance
PCI compliance became a legal requirement for every business in September 2009 and failure to adhere to PCI Compliance comes with a hefty fine of up to £100,000. For some businesses these fines have run into the millions.
In 2006, Visa levied $4.6 million in fines, up from a 2005 total of $3.4 million. More recently, based on a January 2007 breach of compliance, TJX Companies reached a settlement in May 2009 with mastercard Inc. in which it paid up to $24 million to banks and other institutions to cover fraud losses stemming from its massive data breach. TJX, parent of discount retail chains including TJ Maxx, struck a similar deal with rival card network Visa in which it agreed to pay up to $40.9 million.
It pays to use an ecommerce expert
There is a great deal more to PCI Compliance and as a standard part of our ecommerce website creation process we go to great lengths to ensure you become PCI compliant, and as part of our support service we ensure you remain PCI compliant too.
Find our more about PCI Compliance
Get in touch
To talk to us about PCI compliance, or to arrange a consultation please complete the form on the top right, or call us on 01903 779056.
