Advancing eCommerce

Some merchant accounts and gateways are beginning to charge monthly PCI Security Compliance charges to merchants who do online business (most of us). Indeed, the cost of PCI compliance via scanning can be high, running up to several hundred dollars per year.

But some merchant accounts, such as First Data allow you to avoid the charge by filing a PCI DSS compliance report or certification.

Why pay the charge when you can simply email them the report and thus avoid the monthly charge?

When you are an 800Cart customer, you benefit from the PCI DSS Security that we provide for you. This not only makes your shoppers feel safer so they feel ok about buying from you, it also protects your sensitive information from attack and compromise. Lastly, since PCI DSS Security is a requirement imposed by the credit card companies, not an option, 800Cart’s provision of PCI security helps you comply with this expensive requirement.

If you receive an email or letter from your merchant account bank explaining that they need PCI Compliance certification from you to avoid a monthly assessment, you are in good hands with 800Cart!

Here are the steps we recommend you follow if you are given the chance to ‘opt out’ of this fee by filing a compliance report.

1. State in your email to your merchant account administrators that the only resource you use to handle sensitive shopper information is 800Cart and include a copy of the certificate you will find when you click ‘PCI Security’ in your cart control panel main menu and then click ‘View PCI Security Cert’ in the upper right (when you have the document in your browser, click the disk icon to save the document to your local hard drive so you can email it).

2. If your merchant account object object that they need a scan of YOUR web site, you can arrange a free scan of your web site at www.hackerguardian.com (click on ‘Free PCI Scan Now’) and email the results to your merchant account folks.

3. You can also invite your merchant account administrators to go to your web site and click to buy something, then click ‘Security/Privacy’ in the upper left of the cart, then click on the ‘Trusted Commerce’ image to see the PCI DSS Compliance Certificate that is available to each of your shoppers – they do not have to complete a purchase to see or examine the certificate.

While we cannot guarantee that the above steps will help you avoid a PCI Security Compliance charge from your merchant account provider, we do think that providing the above information to your merchant account provider will help you avoid the charge if your provider offer a method to ‘opt out’ of the charge by providing compliance certification.

And of course, if you run into trouble you should always contact us by typing your problem into ‘Quick Question’ in your cart control panel main menu (since ‘Quick Question’ certifies that you are the cart owner and we can safely discuss security issues with you).