Securing Customer Data: 7 Precautions For Accepting Credit Card Payments

July 9, 2007 | Filed Under Security, E-Commerce, Tips

Making the decision to accept credit card payments through your web site is a major step forward and with it comes a lot of responsibility. Rich over at Aiming for Independence has posted a great article outlining the seven actions you should take immediately if your business accepts credit cards. Here are some excerpts:

#2. Make sure that any credit card information being transferred across the Internet is encrypted.
#5. Set a short time limit on storing unencrypted customer information

In addition, I would suggest that, if possible, you avoid storing users’ credit card numbers all together. Often your merchant processing company will store the required information and allow you to issue refunds with only the unique transaction identifier. This ensures that you will never be at risk of compromising your users’ credit card information. Ideally your website will simply serve as a conduit for transferring payment information between the customer and the credit card processing company.

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Comments

One Response to “Securing Customer Data: 7 Precautions For Accepting Credit Card Payments”

  1. merchant services on March 9th, 2008 9:07 pm

    I would add the the best way to ensure you are fully compliant, secure, with 100% uptime is to choose a high qualify virtual terminal/gateway provider such as Authorize Net or Verisign PayFlow. Anyone with a server can create a payment gateway but these companies have the necessary resources and experience to make sure date is secure, is processed 24×7x365 and both have APIs that are compatible with most shopping carts. Do yourself a favor - pay a little more and invest in quality up front and you will avoid the headaches later on.

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