About our Security Procedures

We understand your concern about secure credit card orders over the internet because we often feel the same way about ordering from unfamiliar sites.

As long as you have a secure browser, i.e. Netscape 3.0 or better, or MS Internet Explorer 3.0 or better (if you use another browser, see your browser's documentation) and choose our secure ordering option at check out, your information is as secure as it can be. It is encrypted between your browser and the shopping cart server, and again (when we retrieve the last 6 digits of your credit card number) between the server and our secure browser, so that even if the transaction was intercepted, no one could read it. Your order is emailed to us (and never written to disk on the shopping cart server), without the last 6 digits of your credit card number, so it does no one any good if they did intercept it. If the server was ever hacked, they would only find those missing 6 digits with no other information and no way of telling who's numbers are who's, because those last 6 digits are all that are ever stored on the server.

CREDIT CARD SECURITY

Q:
You say you offer "secure server" for credit card security. What does that mean and how does it work?

A:
Hey, that was TWO questions! :-) The goal of Americart security is to achieve one thing: To deliver credit card information from the customer to the merchant with the minimum possibility of exposure to prying eyes. Our primary tool for this is the utilization of secure data encryption. We encrypt the information between you and the cart, and then the merchant retrieves credit card information the same way. Although orders are emailed to the merchant in the clear, we strip off the last six digits of the credit card number, which the merchant then retrieves through their secure browser, thus completing the secure path.

Q:
What about security on your server?

A:
All computers connected to the internet are theoretically vulnerable to break in, and ours is no exception. Assuming we do have a security breach, a hacker wouldn't find much on our system. We only store the last six digits of card numbers which wouldn't help them at all. The first digits are "piped" straight out to mail, and never written to disk at all.