PCI Compliance For Website Owners

If you are a website owner, you should know that PCI compliance is essential to your site even if you are not required. Shoppers are becoming much more apprehensive these days about shopping online. A wonderful way that you can show your customers that your website is safer than your competitor's sites is by following PCI compliance.

PCI compliance is a responsibility for any third party credit card processor, business, or acquirer, who is receiving, processing, or storing credit card information in any way. So what exactly is PCI compliance? Being PCI compliant means that you are following a set of security standards that were put into place by the Payment Card Industry (PCI) council. These PCI standards are divided up into six categories:

1. Maintain a secure network.
2. Protect cardholder data.
3. Maintain a vulnerability management program.
4. Implement strong access control measures.
5. Regularly monitor and test networks.
6. Maintain and information security policy.

Hopefully this helps answer some questions about what is required for PCI compliance, but despite what you "have to" do to be in compliance, the greatest reason for websites to be PCI compliant is mainly to provide protection for the customers. Online shoppers will be more likely to visit your website if they are sure that their personal information is safe. PCI compliance is a great way to prove this.

One option that I have found to provide PCI compliance is Trust Guard. They provide PCI scanning and trust seals at an affordable price. With trust seals from Trust Guard you will be able to show your visitors that your website is safe and that they can shop on your site securely. This will eventually lead to more sales for you.