Steps to Starting an Online Essential Oils Business: PCI Compliance Checklist

The desire for essential oils has swept the nation, and demand has only continued to grow. Whether you’re a health fanatic or an essential oil aficionado, it only makes sense to start your own business in the field. These handy oils can be used to brighten the aroma of a home or clean a space without harsh chemicals. Becoming a wholesale essential oils provider is a heroic venture, both for yourself and the countless people you’ll be helping along the way. After all, an estimated 69% of small business entrepreneurs start their business in the home.

But even if you know everything about essential oils, you still need to learn many business components when you begin. One of the most important qualities of running a business is ensuring your site is PCI compliant.

This includes ensuring that your e-commerce sites are PCI compliant. You also need to run a PCI compliant call center. But what does this entail? Here’s everything you need to know to get your essential oils business up and running.

PCI compliance checklist

PCI compliance stands for payment card information, but it’s so much more than that. The Payment Card Information Data Security Standard was established with the rise of credit cards. To keep the information of your cards safe, ensuring that your business is PCI compliant is a necessary first step to engaging with online transactions. This is doubly important if your essential oils business runs solely online because customers won’t be able to make in-store cash transactions.

You must meet 12 requirements before you begin exchanging goods and services online. When you want to align with the industry standard, here is a checklist to run through when you’re starting your essential oils business:

Firewall: Establishing and securing a firewall is an essential first step to maintaining user safety. This blocks potential hackers from entering your website and gaining access to user information.

Avoid default passwords: To be compliant with PCI, a company cannot provide default passwords for a client when a new account is created.

Stored data: PCI compliance isn’t just maintaining the safety of new card users. It also includes actively protecting stored cardholder data.

Encryptions: Encrypting data across various transmissions over public connections must be established.

Anti-virus software: It isn’t just hackers you need to worry about; viruses are a serious threat to businesses and customers, alike. This point on the checklist also needs to be updated at a regular cadence.

Secure systems: It’s vital that you maintain secure systems and applications to protect user data.

Need-to-know: As a rule of thumb, cardholder information should rarely, if ever, be shared. As such, you should keep cardholder access information on a “need-to-know” basis.

Unique identifiers: Unique identifiers are needed for anyone who has access to cardholder data or accounts.

Physical access restrictions: Any physical access to user cardholder data needs to be restricted in order to be compliant with PCI.

Log and report: Any time user data or networks are accessed, this needs to be both logged and reported.

Test: PCI compliance demands that the business owner runs frequent tests regarding security and processes.

Policy: Your information security policy should be known by all your clients. Establishing a security policy is the best way to let your clients and your staff know you’re serious about safety.

These are the 12 essential components of PCI compliance. Even though the essential oil business seems wholesome and casual, any reputable business needs to protect their assets.

According to a study by KPMG, Shopify notes that more than 19% of shoppers would cease engaging with a business should they suffer a hack. When you want to ensure the quality of your business and the safety of your customers, complying with PCI is an essential first step to running an essential oils business. Companies like Zen business, INCFile, and NorthWest are good for LLC formation: See them here