Shopping Cart Security 

We understand your concern about using your credit card over the Internet. Here are the facts about Americart, our secure shopping cart service.

As long as you have a secure browser, like 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 about as secure as you can get. It is encrypted between your browser and Americart's shopping cart server, and again between the server and our secure browser (where we retrieve the last 6 digits of your credit card number).  If the server was ever hacked, the hacker would only find those 6 digits with no other info and no way of telling whose numbers are whose, because those last 6 digits are all that are ever stored on the server.

The following is an excerpt from Americart's FAQ page.

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

A:  The goal of our 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 the 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.