Every industry has its standards to assure safety and quality. The world of online payment processing is no different. If you’re a merchant who needs to accept credit cards online, it’s a good idea to educate yourself about some of the standards that both you and your Internet Payment Service Provider (IPSP) should follow. These standards govern everything from the way you handle your customers’ sensitive credit card information, to the code behind your online shopping cart.
So how does an individual (such as a systems administrator, a web developer, or an offshore merchant) or an organization (like Instabill) become “standards-compliant?” Instabill lives, breathes, grows and innovates as a company committed to standards for e-commerce merchants and compliance. In addition to our own internal standards (formulated as part of our overall concept of operations), we strive to comply with a number of external, independently verified standards and specifications, both technical and financial.
Standards for e-commerce merchants, IPSPs, and payment processors
Here are a few of the standards that are important to Instabill’s operations:
PCI DSS
Everyone who processes credit cards online needs to know about the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard, or PCI DSS. This standard serves as a formal, “actionable framework” to ensure a secure payment processing infrastructure. PCI-compliance ranges in scope from the highest to lowest possible levels, detailing both for merchants as well as processors what is required of them.
W3C
Our sysadmins, web and applications developers, and tech support team all know the importance of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standards. These standards define the syntax, style, and coding guidelines for valid HTML, CSS, and XML code (among other things). When you’re visiting a website that not only works, but looks great in both Internet Explorer and Firefox, or going through an online shopping-cart checkout submission, you have W3C standards to thank.
POSIX, XPG, LSB, and Other Systems Specifications
Welcome to my world, a world of portable applications and scripts, of interoperable systems ready to be commanded! Exciting, no? Instabill is at heart a tech company, and we offer the highest quality payment processing services to our customers. We need to have secure, reliable servers. Tasks like daily monitoring, responding to alerts, automating tasks with scripts and using a UNIX shell are all part and parcel of a sysadmin’s job. So too are backups, Disaster Recovery and Planning (DRP), and systems deployments. I cannot tell you how much easier my life is thanks to IEEE, ANSI, ISO, and POSIX standards.
Instabill is a company that meets and exceeds standards every single day. Our main goal is to facilitate e-commerce merchants throughout the world—especially high risk merchants. In so doing, we make a good name not only for ourselves, but for our merchants all over the world.
