How to Stay PCI Compliant for Businesses
PCI requirements may seem daunting if you have an online merchant account. Without in-person transactions, many businesses need to become online merchants to survive. Whether you’re new to it, or been at it for a long time, or are looking into getting a merchant account, you need to know what the PCI requirements are so you can stay compliant, and confident in the knowledge of how PCI requirements could affect you in the future.
Fortunately, staying PCI compliant is not very difficult and is mostly just common sense.
What are PCI requirements?
PCI requirements are a set of guidelines regarding some specific, basic security and safety recommendations. These requirements exist to protect customers of online stores from inadequate security that could put cardholders at risk for identity theft or credit card fraud.
The main reason to become PCI compliant is that businesses that fail to do so can be held liable for identity theft or fraud that occurs as a result of the business’s noncompliance. Additionally, businesses may be fined by their payment processor for failing to maintain PCI compliance.
How do you stay PCI compliant?
To avoid your customers being vulnerable on your site, which in the long run will not only cost you money but will make your site less trustworthy, you need to take measures to stay PCI compliant.
When you create your online merchant account, you need to review the security features. You may need to include these features in your decision of which merchant provider to sign with in the first place.
Many merchant providers include these features for free, but many do not. In order to follow PCI requirements and protect your customers, you need to check which features are automatically included and not assume anything.
Your new online merchant account will also be set up with default passwords. You need to change these if you want to respect PCI law. Default passwords are easy to hack so it’s important to generate strong passwords that only you have access to.
Talk to your payment processor directly, and they can walk you through the steps of making sure that your business complies with all PCI requirements.
The Takeaway
Businesses are now financially responsible for fraud that happens on their site as a result of failure to comply with PCI requirements, which makes compliance imperative.
Visit Charge.com or call (888) 924-2743 to learn your options and find a merchant account that will be PCI compliant