LemonStand - eCommerce Blog about LemonStand shopping cart, news and tutorials

Easily Achieve PCI Compliance with Tokenization

5 Comment(s) | published by Danny H. on Friday, April 30, 2010

PCI compliance is a massive burden and worry for most merchants. Sort of like doing your taxes.

While the Payment Card Industry is getting more strict (and rightfully so) with security, many payment gateway companies have not found a great way to solve the problem. This has lead to many merchants simply ignoring the problem, incurring massive costs or shutting their doors because it's not sustainable.

It also puts eCommerce platform authors in a terrible position when one considers the cost of becoming PA-DSS certified, and maintaining this certification. But thankfully, so far we know of at least one payment gateway company to help solve the problem. That is Braintree.

Meet Braintree's Transparent Redirect

Our unique solutions prevent credit card data from entering a merchant environment without changing the user experience and offer merchants full control over the data. The scope of PCI Compliance is significantly reduced and no credit card data is present to be stolen. We don’t just solve PCI Compliance problems, we make them go away.

By using our Transparent Redirect (TR) and Vault, merchants can achieve PCI Compliance in days. TR and the Vault will eliminate the handling, processing or storing credit card data so you can qualify for the Self Assessment Questionnaire A, the shortest of the four SAQs.

– Taken from Braintree's website.

By using their Transparent Redirect service, you can possibly avoid or highly reduce many complexities and costs associated with PCI compliance.

How it Works

Put simply, card holder data never touches your environment. The customer's browser sends their information directly to Braintree where it is processed. This video will describe the solution in more detail:

LemonStand Supports Braintree's Transparent Redirect

We recently completed integration of Braintree's Transparent Redirect service. That means using LemonStand you can achieve PCI compliance quite easily. While there are more steps involved than simply using this service, it will help tremendously. And it may not cost you anything either.

While it does not completely avoid the requirement to be PCI compliant (like a hosted payment page would) it will greatly reduce scope while allowing you to control the user experience (unlike a hosted payment page).

Start Processing Credit Cards with Braintree

If you would like to process credit cards using Braintree and their amazing Transparent Redirect service, please contact them for pricing. If you plan on using LemonStand, please mention this in your initial message.

Free Developer Licenses

3 Comment(s) | published by Danny H. on Thursday, April 29, 2010

While the free public beta is still available, anyone can evaluate LemonStand without incurring any costs. However, we had to address this issue for once the beta is over as well. The fact is, developers need to test LemonStand without needing to buy a license.

We Love Developers

We came up with a simple plan to solve this challenge. Soon after version 1.0 is released, we'll allow developers to fill out an application in order to receive a developers license. This license will let you install LemonStand on a test environment. Your installation won't be time limited. Instead, it will be limited in other ways (TBD), such as # of products, orders, users, etc.

No Encoding

We won't be encoding any of the files that you'll need access to. Except a few associated with the limitations, you'll be able to have free reign on your LemonStand test environment.

Your Hard Work Won't Go to Waste

As always, you will even be able to upgrade your developers installation of LemonStand to a full version by purchasing a license. After doing so, you can simply run an update and your copy will be "unlocked". Great for turning an evaluation copy into a live website. This is similar to how you can currently upgrade your beta license to a commercial version by pre-order, or ordering once version 1.0 is released.

LemonStand Licensing

0 Comment(s) | published by Danny H. on Wednesday, April 28, 2010

Because LemonStand is a commercial software that we are fully supporting, we had to come up with a licensing scheme that was simple and effective.

Out plans for achieving this are now in place, and we wanted to let the community know about them.

Purchasing Licenses

Purchasing LemonStand licenses will be very simple. Simply select how many you want and pay for them. For each license you purchase, you will be issued a license key. You can also purchase a license on behalf of your customer, and have it linked to your account. Alternatively, you can generate a referral code, and your customer can purchase a license directly from us. If they input the referral code, their license will automatically be linked to your account.

License Keys

License keys are already in place. 1 license = 1 website. "1 website" is a live website + a test environment that does not accept real orders. You can and will be able to upgrade a Beta installation of LemonStand to a commercial version, by purchasing. You can already do this by pre-ordering LemonStand.

Purchase on Behalf of your Customer

Sometimes, you may bill your customer for LemonStand separately. Perhaps including it in the total cost of a development project. In this case, you can purchase a license using your own credit card or PayPal account. You will enter your customers details while purchasing the license. Your customer will be sent a password, which they can use to log-in and manage their own account. The license you purchased for them will be linked to your account. This means, you will see it in your "My Account" area, and it will also count toward your tier pricing discount.

Referral Codes

Referral codes are a great way for you to have your customer purchase a license directly, but still have it linked to your account. In your "My Account" area, you can generate referral codes. A customer only has to enter in the code while purchasing a LemonStand license and not only will the license(s) be linked to your account, they will automatically receive any tier pricing discounts that you qualify for.

Customer Accounts

Something to note is that all customer accounts are the same. Anyone is able to purchase a license on behalf of someone else, and anyone is able to generate referral codes.

Tier Pricing

We will be offering discounts based on the volume of LemonStand licenses that you purchase in some pre-determined window of time. We have not established the exact discount or tier levels yet. This will be available at release time.

Taking it Further

This is only the beginning. We plan to implement affiliate/reseller programs in the future as well, so that you can directly profit from referring customers that purchase LemonStand licenses.

LemonStand Available for Pre-Order

0 Comment(s) | published by Danny H. on Wednesday, April 21, 2010

You can now pre-order LemonStand to save 25%. That is $75 off of the regular $300 price tag that LemonStand will be selling for at launch.

As soon as the public beta is over, the pre-order will be too. So that means this discount won't last forever! In fact, it won't last very long at all as we draw close to releasing version 1.0 of LemonStand.

How it works

To pre-order, you only have to sign up for the beta. You will then be presented with links to purchase by Credit Card or Paypal. If you have already joined the beta program, you should have recieved an email containing those same links.

Version 1 just around the bend

Hundreds of great beta testers have helped us grow LemonStand into a mature and stable shopping cart. Bugs are seldomly being reported anymore. It seems as though we have implemented a great out of the box feature set. The stage is set.

At this point we are developing our back-office tools to handle customer accounts, support and things of that nature. We have been working on this all along, but will be focusing on the final pieces in the coming weeks. Stay tuned!