PCI Compliance Guide
What PCI DSS compliance means for merchants and how to stay compliant without an in-house security team.
PCI DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard) is the set of security requirements every business that accepts card payments has to follow. Compliance isn't optional — but for most small and mid-sized merchants, it's more manageable than it sounds.
What PCI compliance actually requires
The requirements scale with how you process cards and how much volume you do. A retailer using a modern, encrypted terminal has a much lighter compliance burden than a business storing card numbers in its own database.
The self-assessment questionnaire (SAQ)
Most small merchants complete an annual self-assessment questionnaire rather than a full on-site audit. The specific SAQ type depends on how payments are accepted — in person, online via a hosted gateway, or through a custom checkout.
Reducing your compliance burden
Using tokenization, a hosted payment page, or point-to-point encryption keeps raw card data out of your systems entirely, which is the single biggest lever for simplifying PCI scope.