CMS and E-commerce

PCI Compliance Issues

Continuing our previous articles about legal issues, there is another legal issues you need to know, PCI Compliance. PCI DSS, is short for Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard. This is a specific set of rules for ensuring secure, proper handling of credit cards by all commercial vendors. Any company that processes, stores, or transmits credit card information must follow these guidelines, thereby being PCI compliant.

You absolutely do not want to store the user’s credit card information! There are companies that do that, yes, but that’s their full-time job and they have the knowledge, resources, and money to do that properly. Still, even taking credit card information on your site and passing it off to another company means you should be PCI compliant. The specific requirements differ based upon what you actually do with credit cards and how many transactions per year you process.

Joomla and E-commerce

There are various types of components and modules for Joomla! which can be used for e-commerce. Due to a large number of components available, e-commerce in Joomla! is not only limited to selling products, but it can also adopt other forms of e-commerce activities such as running affiliate shops, charging money for access to premium content, running an auction site, and so on.

Affiliate carts are one form of e-commerce where you show products from other shops or catalogs. Visitors to your shop can browse the products on your shop and buy it from that shop or catalog. You don’t need to manage the inventory, fulfill the orders, process the payment, and such things. You get the commissions for each sell you generate through your affiliate store. For example, Amazon has a great affiliate scheme which you may be familiar with.