Visa and Mastercard PCI Standard

The Visa and Mastercard PCI DSS standards are something any merchants need to be compliant to if a merchant is storing credit cards or credit card information on a own server.
Often it is required to store credit card informations from card holders when a merchant want to tintegrate their e-commerce website into the payment gateway, means, the merchants customers won't leave the website to key-in the credit card number, cvv etc. but will do this directly on the merchants website.

The basic requirements in order to comply with the PCI standard are:

• The website need to have a SSL certificate installed and used where credit card informations are entered.
• The server and website needs to be scanned for any vulnerabilities and other security holes, often this is done by companies like Qualys or Security Metrics
• The merchant is not allowed to store any CVV, CVV2 numbers at all on the server