What is PCI Compliance?

And Why Is It Important To Select A Certified Provider?

The PCI Standards, www.pcisecuritystandards.org, are a result of collaboration between the five major credit card companies to develop a single approach to safeguarding sensitive data, preventing credit card fraud, hacking and various other security issues. The standards define a series of best practices for handling, transmitting and storing sensitive data.

Currently, any merchant, organization or software that processes, stores or disseminates credit card data must be PCI DSS compliant or they risk hefty fines and/or losing the ability to process credit cards altogether thus putting their entire business in jeopardy.

In May of this year, Mountain Media's was granted level 1 PCI compliance, making us one of only a handful of ecommerce providers to achieve this level. Our compliant processes and products allow us to provide online merchants with a safe and reliable solution that helps to satisfy the "trust factor" that is required to turn an online visitor into an online shopper.

A recent article published by Internet Retailer noted that shopping carts are often the culprit in card data thefts at ecommerce sites, making it all the more important for online merchants to select compliant eCommerce and payment gateway providers and to ensure that their sites and practices are compliant as well.

Did You Know?

Having Difficulty Getting Your Site To Rank In Yahoo?

Did you know that using the "description" meta-tag will help your site's Yahoo! rankings quite a bit? Be sure to write your description accurately and carefully. After the title, the description is the most important draw for users. Make sure your pages include a title, and a description that attracts the interest of the user but also fits the content of that particular page. Mountain Commerce and Mountain Publisher Web sites have a "meta description field" for each page. If you use them, your site will climb in Yahoo!'s search results!