What part of PCI Compliance is mandatory and what is voluntary?
It’s all mandatory. Nothing is voluntary. The rule is if you store, process, or transmit credit card data you must be compliant with the PCI standards. And that’s a global rule.
What if I am not PCI compliant?
If you do not meet the PCI standards for compliance and the security of your site gets compromised, you will be facing penalties and fines ranging from $5,000 to $500,000. The fines, however, are just the beginning of the overall damage caused by noncompliance.
If your website or company are not PCI compliant, you run the risk of losing your merchant account, which means you won’t be able to accept credit card payments at all. You will also be placed in the Visa/MasterCard Terminated Merchant File (TMF), making you ineligible to obtain another merchant account, at least for several years. The TMF, is essentially a BLACKLIST from which it is almost impossible to be removed.
When a merchant is added the the TMF, sometimes called The Match File, their name, business name, business address, and home address are all noted. So, you can’t just apply for a new account under the name of another family member or business partner because it will be seen as the same business and location.
Getting on The Match File is just about the worst thing that can happen to any merchant.
How much does CloudSwipe cost?
CloudSwipe is free to use while developing your site.
Upgrade for $150.00/year and enable your payment gateway to accept live payments.
No transaction fees, no contracts, and you can cancel at any time.
Are there any other costs when using CloudSwipe?
Your payment gateway, such as Stripe or Authorize.net, will also charge you according to your agreement with them. For example, if you are using Stripe, they charge you 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction in addition to your CloudSwipe account.
Why do I need a payment gateway to use CloudSwipe?
CloudSwipe provides a secure and PCI compliant ecommerce platform for collecting and transmitting credit card information to your payment gateway. You need the payment gateway to charge the credit cards and deposit money into your bank account.
Can I cancel my account?
Yes, you can cancel at any time. The annual cost is not pro-rated or refunded. When you cancel your account, your account will be closed immediately and your secure hosted payment page will no longer accept live credit card transactions.
Why not just use PayPal or Google Checkout?
Just like using PayPal or Google Checkout, CloudSwipe removes all the security concerns from handling ecommerce transactions for your website. Unlike PayPal and Google Checkout, CloudSwipe still gives you complete control over the design of your checkout page. Other than the domain name changing in the web browser your checkout page will look exactly like your website. CloudSwipe will host all your images, CSS, HTML, etc. for your checkout page so you do not have to worry about security scans, SSL certificates, dedicated IP addresses, log monitoring and PCI compliance regulations for your website.
Why not just transmit credit cards to my payment gateway from my own server?
One of the main goals behind CloudSwipe is to remove all of the security concerns associated with passing credit card data between your checkout page and your payment gateway. Getting a website that transmits credit card data to be PCI compliant is a hard and expensive burden that involves getting a dedicated IP address, and SSL certificate, quarterly security scans and an expensive server configuration. CloudSwipe lets you completely design your own checkout page, not just set some colors and a logo but COMPLETELY design it. CloudSwipe will slurp up all your HTML, CSS, javascript, images, etc. and host them on our secure ecommerce platform. So when your buyer hits your checkout page it doesn’t look any different from the rest of your site.
For more information about PCI compliance, read What you need to know about PCI compliance.
