Merchant PCI Program Launch

If you’re not already aware, the payment card industry (PCI) mandates PCI compliance for everyone that captures, processes or stores credit cards. A recent article by Practical eCommerce indicates that level 4 merchants (those processing less than 20,000 credit card transactions a year), are now the focus of the industry’s push to enforce compliance.

While Mountain Media is a level 1 CISP certified compliant hosting provider, you, as the merchant are also responsible for maintaining a PCI compliant environment. Selecting a compliant ecommerce partner such as Mountain Media was your first step in the process and now, you’ll need to ensure that you regularly scan your website and have practices in place to ensure safe handling of the credit card data you transact. Compliance will help you avoid “non-compliance fees” by your merchant bank and avoid the risk of a security breach which could result in losing your ability to process credit cards altogether.

We’re here to help you! Mountain Media recently teamed up with McAfee, Inc. to offer our Mountain Commerce merchants McAfee PCI compliance services. By registering for your free PCI Compliance account, McAfee provides you with access to a complete PCI compliance service already utilized by thousands of retailers like you.

Through our new relationship with McAfee, you’ll get the assistance you need and upon completing the compliance process, you’ll receive a validation report for submission to your merchant bank, demonstrating your compliance.

The McAfee PCI Compliance Service is an easy-to-use system ideally suited to smaller retailers and because Mountain Media is already a level 1 certified service provider, the process for our merchants to validate their compliance is even that much easier. Here is how to validate your PCI compliance in just a few steps:

1. Click here to sign up for the McAfee PCI Certification service.
2. Complete Self-Assessment Questionnaire A (SAQ)
3. Fix any issues discovered in the SAQ process.
4. Have your web site scanned for security vulnerabilities (charges apply for McAfee to perform your scanning)
5. Fix any vulnerabilities discovered during the scans.
6. After successfully completing the SAQ and security scan, you can produce a PCI Validation Report for submission to your merchant bank.

Don’t want to tackle the process yourself? Contact Mountain Media to find out about our PCI Administrative Services. For a flat fee, Mountain Media can serve as an extension of your own team and complete the process for you!

Call today: 877-583-0300

Internet Marketing Insights

Be Prepared for Emerging Trends and Opportunities in 2009

If you’ve dismissed blogging, social media networking, and the use of streaming videoas “flashes in the pan,” this year might be a good time to re-examine that point of view.

The popular social networking site, Facebook.com, is a good example of how rapidly things are changing in the way people use the Internet. Originally started five years ago as a way for Harvard College students to network with each other, its popularity and growth quickly led FaceBook to open its membership tojust about anyone with a valid email address. Fast forward to June 2008, when Facebook earned the rank (on Alexa.com) of being the 5th most popular web site on the Internet, generating 132.1 million visitors a month. The bottom line is that more and more ecommerce businesses will be creating a profile and establishing a presence on sites like Facebook.com, Squidoo.com, Linkedin.com, and MySpace.com in 2009.

The explosive growth of YouTube, a video sharing web site, will also gain momentum as a channel for promoting products and services. Created just four years ago, it was later purchased by Google in November 2006 for 1.65 billion dollars. Since that precedent-shattering transaction, the growth of YouTube and other outlets for ecommerce video continues to grow exponentially.

Against the backdrop of more social media networking and the expanding use of video as an Internet marketing tool, we offer these emerging trends, ideas, and technologies to put on your radar for 2009:

• Mobile search. By June of 2008, an average of 20.8 million people were using their cell phones and PDAs (Personal Digital Assistant) to find products and services on the Net, an increase of 68% over the previous year. If this trend continues, we could see 58.7 million people actively using mobile search by 2010.
• As a result of the ailing economy and the emergence of “personalized search results” on Google, more value will be placed on improving website conversion rates and getting the maximum rate-of-return from targeted keyword phrases and site visitors.
• Keeping in touch with your established customer base, through techniques such as email marketing, will help increase return visits and build valuable, long-term client relationships.

Mountain Media's marketing professionals will be happy to work with you to identify Internet marketing opportunities, adapt to the changing business climate, and help you grow your online business in 2009!

Did You Know?

You can reach millions of potential buyers with Mountain Commerce's Google Base Product feeds, that easily adds products from your Mountain Commerce store to a network of the world's largest retailers through Google Shopping.

Contact us today to learn more about getting started!