Tag Archives: merchants

Customer Service: Tips From a Friend [2023 Update]

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Today The Official Merchant Services Blog begins a special two-part series on Customer Service. A previous blog focused on how important Customer Service is for a business during the holiday shopping season. We are currently in the midst of one of the busiest holiday shopping seasons on record, according to the early sales data that has been reported. So to bolster your efforts, we’re going to highlight information and advice brought to our attention from our friends over at Software Advice.

Fellow industry blogger Lauren Carlson ran a two-part series at Software Advice dealing specifically with customer service and the holidays. It’s an insightful series that begins with offering advice on how to prepare your customer service department –– namely your help desk –– for the rigors of increased business from holiday shopping.

And What Are Those Tips?

Carlson’s article was timed for the lead up to Black Friday, but much of its advice is still extremely relevant to merchants facing the rest of the season. After all, the questions that get asked at your help desk aren’t going to subside until after the holidays. Or as Carlson says, the guidelines she gives “if done, can prevent potential chaos and better prepare your agents to handle the spike. This translates to happier customers during the holidays, who will turn into repeat customers once the wrapping paper has settled.”

The first tip given is to create a holiday specific FAQ list. Carlson states that the types of questions a lot of help desks get hit with during the holiday season can vary from the normal questions that get asked the rest of the year and as such, suggests brainstorming and coming up with a list ahead of time to prepare. Due to timeliness, that may no longer be a viable option for a lot of merchants. But by now, you may have a pretty good handle on the varying questions that you were hit with on Black Friday and all through Cyber Week. Which brings us to the best advice found in the first tip: “Post the simpler questions up on your site to avoid spending time on those calls.”

This can be done to enhance the e-commerce experience, getting it out to your customers and providing them with both information that they need, and a click through into your site. Or this can be done just for your own help desk’s internal sanity, having a quick reference guide on hand for when they are barraged with these questions that make your list. As Carlson states, this type of list “will enable agents to resolve a majority of issues on the first call.” And it will be useful for the duration of the season, preventing your staff from having to scramble to find answers even as it gets to be late into the shopping season.

Cross-training to Stay Prepared

The next tip Carlson offers is to cross-train your staff. She cites Matt Trifiro, Senior VP of Marketing at Assistly who explains that cross-training your employees can help you reduce the need for hiring seasonal staff. Carlson says of cross-training: “Much like athletes cross-train to improve the whole body, companies can train every employee – from receptionists to accountants – to be a support agent, improving support across the entire organization.”

This is a great tip for merchants looking to weather the holiday shopping blitz but not go through the process of training seasonal help that they have to let go a short time later. It’s also a quick way to deal with support issues that may have just now cropped up well after Black Friday. Host Merchant Services itself utilizes that same philosophy in its own customer support structure and finds that it does help a business be more responsive and more effective at handling support issues year-round.

Carlson maps out the plan for cross-training your staff, suggesting that a merchant should equip all their employees to answer basic questions customers may have. Then Carlson says merchants should set up an escalation procedure for situations that require additional steps or expertise. This will create a smoother flow for service during the high traffic times of the holiday shopping season.

Communication Has Many Channels

The next tip Carlson gives revolves around communicating when your business is on its own holiday. A lot of Merchants, such as restaurants, have a different set of hours as the actual holidays approach. Carlson suggests merchants should communicate clearly and consistently with their customers about any downtime or time where the business is unavailable during the holiday shopping season. And in 2011, there are quite a lot of avenues in which to communicate this information: “Alert customers on every possible medium (website, Facebook, blog, Twitter, voicemail) of your seasonal hours and availability. Communicating this clearly will help avoid confusion and, more importantly, dissatisfaction.”

This information also applies to any other Merchant needing to reach out to its customers –– including adding extra service hours during holiday shopping like a lot of retailers do. Social media sites like Facebook, Google+ and Twitter are amazing tools available for customer interaction and can help you keep your customers up to date on all the latest developments your business goes through during the holiday shopping season.

Support Your Support Agents

The final tip Carlson gives for merchants to prepare their customer support help desk for the holiday shopping rush is to have a plan in place that will offer support for those who are your support agents. Carlson states: ” Help desk and support center employees will be very busy and likely very stressed during the holidays. Savvy companies will invest a lot of energy into supporting their agents via rewards, bonuses, in-office R&R, etc.”

Having something concrete in place that defuses stress and gives your support team some focus or incentive can help your business navigate through the increased stress and tension that holiday shopping can place on a business. This falls in line with Host Merchant Services’ own partnership protocols in the e-commerce section of its services –– where the company’s goal is to take the stress and burden of merchant services off of the business and onto the the merchant services provider. This enhances the overall partnership by making it less stressful for both partners. The same applies to customer service, especially during a time when the increase in business can exponentially increase stress.

Even though Black Friday has passed, this increased stress will continue to build. So it’s definitely not too late to consider implementing some sort of program or incentive to give your support staff both a tip of the hat for its hard work and a goal to strive for that will keep them going through the rest of the holiday rush.

Conclusion

Lauren Carlson offers some rock solid advice for customer support during the holiday shopping season. Many of the tips are easy to implement and do not take a lot of added time investment to get working. Host Merchant Services is always looking for useful insight on customer service to pass along to merchants. Quality customer service helps build long-term relationships with your customers, and can keep them coming back to you long after the holiday shopping season is over. Tomorrow The Official Merchant Services Blog will take a look at part two of Carlson’s series.

Use Analytics to Maximize E-Commerce

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Then next phase in The Official Merchant Services Blog series on assisting merchants with beefing up their e-commerce presence this holiday shopping season focuses on web analytics. In a previous blog we gave merchants tips on how to improve the overall e-commerce picture. That blog focused on broad strokes and the process of landing on the merchant’s site and purchasing goods or services from the site. A second blog delved into Search Engine Optimization, assisting merchants with boosting their web site’s page rank when potential customers searched for the goods and services the merchant was selling.

Today’s blog brings both of those strategies together through web analytics. The process needs to be streamlined and strong. Your customers need to be able to find your page when they search, find your products when they get there and buy your products with no hassles. Click, click, purchase.

And how do you know if that is working? If your site is actually doing that and doing it well?

That’s where analytics come in.

Good website analytics take the mystery out of wondering who’s visiting your website and why. You don’t need to be an online marketing whiz to use them effectively. There are plenty of analytics packages for sale, but you can get started for free through Google Analytics. The Google service provides you with a line of code to plug into each of your website pages, and you can then start tracking your site’s data. You can get a breakdown not only of how many visitors came to the website, but how long they stayed, what site they previously came from, what search terms they used to reach the website, and which pages they visited the most.

Here are five questions to help you maximize your use of website analytics:

  • Do your visitors already know you? The whole point of the website is to link you with potential new customers who interested in your business. A well-designed website should only have a small percentage of visitors who have used the company’s name to find it in a search query –– suggesting they already know your business before they stopped by.
  • Are you bringing in potential customers? You want to make sure that people landing on your page are getting there using specific keywords. These keywords are relevant to the goods and services you provide. That way the traffic that seeks you out is the traffic that wants to purchase what your site is selling. Let’s say you’re a web hosting provider. You want the people searching for “web hosting” or “cloud hosting” to find you.
  • Does your social media presence work? Analytics let you monitor where your visits come from. So you can gauge how many visitors are coming from your social media activities. Google Analytics also lets you set goals, which can then be tuned to your social media outlets. Essentially you can judge how effective your Facebook Ad or Google Ad campaigns are by seeing what traffic they generate. And you can also tailor your goals section to track specific things related to your social media profiles. For example you can set a goal to monitor how much traffic you get from a specific Facebook ad or a Twitter Tweet.
  • Are visitors bailing from your homepage? Google Analytics tells you your homepage’s bounce rate, the percentage of homepage visitors who never clicked on additional pages. This is key for analyzing your e-commerce vitality. A lot of sites can generate visits, but if you’re not keeping people around and they’re not clicking through to your goods and services, you’re going to have a high bounce rate. If the bounce rate is more than 60 to 70 percent, you have a problem with your landing page, and possibly your marketing strategy. This problem is infecting your entire e-commerce setup and hurting your business. The search terms your visitors are using to find the site tell you whether they’re the people you want. If they are the right type of visitors and they aren’t delving deeper into the site, then the blame goes on the homepage.
  • Are they looking at your product or service pages? Your website is designed to generate sales or interest in your services. So beyond just the bounce rate of the homepage, it’s important to analyze your product pages. If website visitors aren’t looking at the pages that allow this to happen, then either your homepage is not doing its job or (if your bounce rate is not terrible, but your business isn’t being generated) there’s a problem with the product pages themselves. The homepage should be divided into decision-making paths that quickly separate visitors by their interests and lead them to the information they are looking for. The goal is to make the click through process easy and seamless. The customer arrives, finds what they want and goes and gets it.

 

That’s analytics in a brief nutshell. The data that programs like Google Website Analytics gives you can help shed light on problem areas with your e-commerce package. It is easy to use, so don’t be intimidated by the numbers. Take your time learning the program as these numbers are the key to finding out whether your website is effectively generating business.

 

E-Commerce SEO Tips for Merchants [2023 Update]

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The Official Merchant Services Blog once again picks up its thread about the impact 2011’s holiday shopping season is going to have on e-commerce. Previously we gave merchants tips on improving their e-commerce experience for customers. These tips were primarily focused on things merchants can do with their website and their online shopping cart. Today we’re going to offer some tips on improving your site’s Search Engine Optimization (SEO). This is basically the other side of the coin. With the first set of tips the goal was to make it easy for your potential customers to use your site, and buy things from you effectively. With these SEO tips the goal is to make it easy for potential customers to find your web site in the first place.

What is SEO?

SEO

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the visibility of a website or a web page in search engines via the “natural” search results that come up from using the search engine. SEO is absolutely vital to your online business. SEO is what helps the search engines such as Google find your website or your products in whichever marketplace you are using. In general, the earlier (or higher ranked on the search results page), and more frequently a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine’s users. So the basic goal of SEO is to get a web site ranked on the first page.

How to Improve your SEO

Here are a few effective tips from Google itself and its SEO Report Card to help you use best SEO practices and boost traffic to your website or listings:

  • Offer Quality Content and Services

    –– According to Google, interesting websites will increase search engine recognition on their own. The internet is content driven. So the first step in improving your SEO is to make sure you have compelling, consistent content. In fact, here is what the Google SEO gurus have to say about your site’s content: “Creating compelling and useful content will likely influence your website more than any of the other factors discussed here.” Great content is more apt to be shared and linked to, which will help boost your rankings with the search engine results pages, or SERPs.

  • Create more descriptive title tags

    –– Optimized keywords and an effective URL naming structure can help the search engine understand the content of the page better. It is suggested to use a maximum of 60 characters on title tags as an opportunity to tell both users and search engines what the focus of the page is. There’s no need to go past this many characters, as most search engines will display ellipses ( … ) after this limit. Also, search engines may give less weight to words after a certain point.

  • Write Better Anchor Text

    –– What is anchor text? It’s the clickable text that users see as the result of a link and is placed within the anchor tag. This text tells Google and the other search engines, as well as internet users, a little something about the page you are linking to. You should use descriptive, concise text and format links so that they’re easily spotted. Don’t neglect your internal anchor text, either.

  • Create effective URLs

    –– Choose the form of the URL that is easiest to remember as the canonical and be consistent with this canonical form across all products. Think of the most common URL forms visitors are likely to try and then 301 redirect these to the preferred/canonical URL or be sure to use the rel=”canonical” link element if you cannot redirect.

  • Optimize Your Use of Images

    –– In the last blog post, we discussed the importance of using high quality images of your products in your shopping cart and how that helps you make sales. Those same images can help your SEO, if you utilize the text that comes with them properly. You can use a filename along with alt text for images and should take full advantage of both. The content of the alt attribute contains information about your image. Don’t scatter your image files in a bunch of directories and subdirectories, but store them all in a single directory. This will greatly simplify the path to your images. Use commonly supported file types such as PNG, JPEG, GIF and BMP.

The real work here for a successful e-commerce merchant is combining the strategies from the previous blog with the tips presented here. You need to make your site come up on the first page of a google search so customers can find you. Then once they click you need to have an strong, easy to use site so those same customers can make their purchase quickly and hassle-free. All of this leads up to the final submission of the sale, which is where Host Merchant Services steps in and makes the payment processing easy for you and completely worry-free. Let our tips and information help you with the first two steps, and then we’ll handle the processing.

E-Commerce Tips for Merchants [2023 Update]

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The Official Merchant Services Blog continues its coverage of the holiday shopping season and its impact on the e-commerce industry. Today we’re going to give some very brief, incisive tips on how merchants can improve their e-commerce presence and hopefully improve their profits in the holiday shopping season.

Think Like a Consumer, and Put your Products in More than One Category

Make your online shop easy to navigate and your products easy to locate. The online businesses that make their goods and services easy to find reap rewards in two ways: people purchase more and they experience greater overall satisfaction with the web site. While reorganizing and streamlining your catalog, consider up-sell and cross-sell opportunities by offering products that make logical sense together. For example, if you sell paintings and frames, show the frames that best complement the paintings. If you sell a line of products that have a wide range of prices, show the progression from the least expensive to the most expensive. Customers may choose to purchase the higher priced items if they’re presented as options.

Keep it Simple

Many people cite overly complicated navigation or too many pages in the purchase path as reasons they don’t complete their online sale or abandon their shopping cart. Successful e-commerce sites simplify the checkout process and display clear pricing and shipping information –– making the shopping experience take the fewest amount of clicks possible to get from landing on the site to completing checkout. They also post clear return policies and access to customer service. Putting your brick and mortar store’s phone number in a visible place on your web site is also a good idea. Studies suggest that consumers feel more confident knowing you are readily available if they have a question or if there’s a problem with their order.

A picture really is worth a thousand words, so use quality photos of your products instead of long descriptive text blocks. Online usability studies suggest that people do not read, they scan. It’s harder to read text on computer screens, so keep these guidelines in mind for optimum readability: Headlines should be 8 words or less, shoot for 9-12 words on a line (people don’t want to read across the entire screen); keep sentences short (15-20 words) and try to keep summaries under 30 words; and hold paragraphs to 40-70 words. In this way you can maintain compelling product descriptions alongside your high quality images.

Market your Site Once it’s Live

It’s not enough to just build a web site. You need to make a focused effort to market and promote your web site to new and existing customers. Collect e-mail addresses on your site to help you keep in touch with customers and consider creating a newsletter or a blog. Seek back links from other sites that complement yours. Optimize your site’s content for relevance and submit it to the major search engines.

Make Payment Processing Easy

Online shoppers need a way to give you money online. That’s easy these days. You can accept credit card payments with merchant account from Host Merchant Services. HMS is ideal for anyone trying out the e-commerce waters since the company guarantees a low rate, and does not lock you into a contract or saddle you with termination fees. Host Merchant Services also offers a fully customized e-commerce solution tailored to your specific business. You can get further details simply by contacting the company or filling out this form here.

Nonprofit Reduced Merchant Rates

Interchange Change For Charities

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A really short entry in The Official Merchant Services Blog today. More of a news flash for merchants:

Effective October 15, 2011, Visa introduces the Consumer Credit Card Charity Interchange Rate Program for charitable organizations –– which specifically only refers to organizations with the Merchant Category Code (MCC) of 8398, Charitable and Social Service Organizations – Fundraising. Processing requirements for this program will be the same as those for the current CPS Retail 2 Program (the previous interchange program that was available to charitable contributions). The new rates for this program are 1.35% + $0.05.

Host Merchant Services offers this great low rate affected by Visa’s recent announcement in addition to the quality customer service and targeted focus of HMS processing solutions. Download our quick reference guide here to have all the information on this new interchange rate at your fingertips.

Tiered vs. Interchange Plus Part 2

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The Official Merchant Services Blog continues it’s two-part series on Tiered Pricing vs. Interchange Plus. After yesterday’s blog defined what Three-Tier pricing looks like, we now take a closer look at how it falls apart and does not save merchants money. Then we’ll outline Interchange Plus pricing and highlight why Host Merchant Services uses this plan to save its merchants money.

Where the Problems Occur

The three tiers of a typical Tiered Pricing plan are commonly referred to as rate buckets or buckets. And Merchant Service Providers who use tiered pricing structures for their customers utilize a “qualification matrix” that dictates which rate bucket the various interchange categories will qualify to. That means that the fees can shift from month to month as a merchant consistently fails to meet the “standard” transaction of the Qualified bucket. Thus each month they consistently have to pay surcharges from the other two buckets which aren’t adequately displayed or described on their statement.

And because these fees and surcharges from the other two bucket rate tiers are often hidden, that makes it difficult to accurately compare rates and fees from competing providers unless a merchant knows how each provider will be qualifying those categories. Because the categories aren’t directly comparable and because the qualification matrix can shift fees on a merchant from month to month, a common occurrence is a merchant can look at two separate tiered pricing offers from different Merchant Services Providers that look nearly identical because they use the same language for each tier, and yet could be different by hundreds of dollars each month.

Merchants Have to do the Hard Part

This puts the responsibility squarely on the shoulders of the merchant. They need to read the fine print of their statement and understand the subtle differences between the tiers to note when they get shifted to a different tier. This is the most common way Merchant Services Providers make money. The sales pitch when signing the merchant focuses on the low end bucket that saves the customer the most money. But then once the processing starts, buckets shift and the merchant gets a lot more charges than they initially signed up for.

So if your statement shows that you have a lot of mid-qualified or non-qualified surcharges each month, it’s time to consider switching to Interchange Plus, the pricing structure that Merchant Service Providers like Host Merchant Services offers.

The Advantage of Interchange Plus

Interchange Plus pricing is based on the “interchange” tables published by both Visa and MasterCard. At first that may seem like a daunting pricing plan. But it ends up being a lot easier to understand, completely transparent to the merchant, and less expensive than tiered pricing plans. Interchange plus pricing has the merchant pay the exact interchange fee from the tables in addition to a flat markup fee from their Merchant Services Provider. That’s where the name comes from: It’s the Interchange fee Plus the markup fee. This eliminates all of the hidden fees you would find in a tiered pricing plan. And gets rid of surcharges that merchants would incur for transactions that don’t fit the standardized portion of the rate bucket matrix. You pay what you are told you will be paying.

This makes it less popular than tiered pricing plans where Merchant Services Providers can make quite a bit of money off of those surcharges due to the latitude they have in defining their tiered bucket rates. But Interchange Plus makes statements easier to read, customer service easier to provide to merchants, and savings much easier to guarantee. All of those elements are cornerstones of Host Merchant Services. So Interchange Plus is the best fit for the company and for their customers.

Tiered Pricing vs. Interchange Plus

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Today The Official Merchant Services Blog is going to delve into the murky world of hidden fees and tiered pricing plans. This is the first in a two-part series and it focuses on Tiered Pricing. Host Merchant Services offers an Interchange Plus pricing plan. The company offers this plan because of its transparency and the savings it can provide when compared to the far more popular tiered pricing plans. To get a better grasp of why Interchange Plus works so good for Host Merchant Services, it helps to understand what is happening with a tiered pricing plan and how that kind of plan works.

Hidden Fees From Tiered Pricing Plans Unfair to Merchants

Tiered credit card pricing can be unfair to small business owners. Many credit card payment processors calculate merchant costs using a tiered pricing structure. These tiered pricing levels increase the costs for merchants by suggesting they are paying one rate, but hiding other fees into the statements and in the end the merchant is paying a higher percentage. The answer to this problem is Interchange plus pricing.

Host Merchant Services uses Interchange Plus. And this pricing structure is the most transparent and easiest to read system in terms of the statement and the way fees are charged. The merchant sees everything they are being charged for in their statement. Nothing is hidden, and there are no shenanigans employed in getting merchants to think they are saving with a low rate that ends up being made up for in a series of other fees snuck into each statement.

Three tier pricing is currently one of the most popular pricing structures used in the payment processing industry. Here’s a table that defines the three tiers:

It’s all About The Surcharges

Tiered pricing plans start with the qualified rate. This is the standard fee a merchant is charged when they accept and process a credit card or debit card transaction. This is also the lowest rate the merchant can incur. Transactions that don’t qualify for the standard set forth at that rate get hit with various surcharges. And its these surcharges where the processor starts to make a lot of profit. And its these surcharges which are usually the hidden fees that don’t show up on a merchant’s statement.

There are over 500 different interchange categories between the major credit card companies and each category has its own charge that is comprised of a percentage and often a per transaction fee. The three tier pricing structure merges all of these charges into three buckets. And a Merchant Services Provider has its own discretion, to an extent, as to which bucket or tier they place these categories.

These underlying interchange categories are not disclosed on a tiered pricing plan so there’s no way of knowing into which bucket each category is being charged. This is where hidden fees crop up.

 

Merchants are Slacking on Security

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According to a study by Verizon, 79% of organizations were not fully compliant with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) in their initial audit in 2010. That’s about the same level as the previous year, the first year the study was done. This is distressing news since PCI Compliance is extremely important for merchants and non-compliance carries heavy penalties.

Host Merchant Services offers its customers and potential customers a PCI Compliance Initiative, which includes a free scan, analysis and report.

HMS works with its customers to ensure they are PCI Compliant, offering resources, information and assistance every step of the way.

 

Secure transactions are important for merchants and a key element of the customer service HMS provides. Which is what makes the following statistics from the Verizon study somewhat disconcerting, considering how easy PCI Compliance is to maintain through Host Merchant Services:

This article by Information Week delves into the statistics from the Verizon report, and offers five reasons why merchants are letting their PCI Compliance slip each year.

“1. Businesses See PCI As A Burden. PCI isn’t exactly a new standard, or complying with it a new requirement. Why aren’t more businesses taking it to heart? “Well, it’s hard to say, but one common reason is that they have not internalized the fact that PCI DSS is to help them (as well as card brands and banks) with security. It is not to punish them for failing an audit. PCI is seen by many as an ‘externality,’ not something they ‘adopted for themselves,'” said Gartner analyst Anton Chuvakin in an interview.”

Host Merchant Services understands that PCI Compliance, especially being an annual requirement, can be an added burden on its customers. That’s why HMS created its PCI Compliance Initiative. The company seeks to shoulder that burden for its customers, making PCI Compliance as hassle-free as possible.

“2. Merchants Don’t Maintain Continuous Compliance. Many businesses don’t pursue PCI as a way to improve security, but rather treat it as a compliance obligation. “PCI is still often seen as a ‘one time per year’ thing, and such an attitude is pretty harmful–but mostly to the merchants themselves, by the way. Organizations keep ‘doing it over,’ not maintaining it,” said Chuvakin.”

Host Merchant Services, due to CEO Lou Honick‘s prior experience with the web  hosting industry, has a keen insight into how essential the security that PCI Compliance is attempting to standardize can be for its merchants. Which is another key reason why HMS is so involved in seeing that its merchants maintain their PCI Compliance.

“3. Poor Awareness Means Lackluster Effort. Compliance officers–or perhaps senior managers–are failing to educate themselves about PCI, and according to Verizon’s research, the greater awareness of PCI found in a business, the greater the actual compliance. “The more aware your organization is of the standard, the more prepared you are for the type of approach you take,” said Verizon’s Mack.”

Host Merchant Services also understands the trouble it can be keeping informed on PCI details and information. Which is why the company’s PCI Compliance Initiative includes easily available online resources to answer as many questions about PCI as possible, an online guide for the most common merchant classification to become PCI Compliant, as well as offering all of this information directly to the merchants face-to-face or on the phone. The goals of the program are to keep the merchant informed, make PCI Compliance easy to understand and easier to maintain.

“4. Compliance Checklists Trump Security Posture. To help businesses better comply with PCI, the council in 2009 released the PCI DSS Prioritized Approach to help businesses know which aspects of PCI to address first to most mitigate the risks to cardholder data. But Verizon saw a 10% drop in use of the prioritized approach, and little use of it overall. “

This issue is handled by HMS’ PCI Initiative as well. The company is there working directly with merchants step-by-step on PCI Compliance. So the checklists are handled, but there is also the HMS agent’s expertise on hand with each item on the checklist. So the merchant’s overall security posture is still taken into account. PCI Compliance is an important part of a merchant’s security and Host Merchant Services keeps that in mind through each part of the compliance process.

“5. Businesses Not Prepping For PCI 2.0? Businesses that skimp on continuous compliance may soon find themselves called to account as they move to PCI DSS 2.0, with which businesses could have begun demonstrating compliance as of October 2010.”

Host Merchant Services stays up to date on PCI Compliance standards and takes all of the burden onto the company’s shoulders. HMS keeps its merchants well informed about changes, but also does all of the hard work to explain the details and make sure its customers are continuously compliant.

If you take some time to review the PCI Compliance information we have on our site you’ll see that the process is straightforward and it is easy for us to maintain compliance for our customers. This is a path we walk down with our customers. Security is essential in payment processing. And we are here to ensure our merchants are secure and do not backslide into a position where they could get heavy penalties for non-compliance.

The statistics from the Verizon study are somewhat dismaying to read. But our analysis of them seems to indicate that it’s simply an example of where HMS’ focus on customer service steps things up. PCI Compliance can be easy to slack on when the onus is completely on the merchant’s shoulders. And a lot of Merchant Services Providers haven’t taken HMS’ unique approach so the burden remains on the merchant. At Host Merchant Services we take the burden, and help keep you informed, up to date and secure. PCI Compliance is too important to let slide.