Turning Something into Nothing

Recently we finished up a couple of E-commerce sites with the integrated webiva shop running off of a standard merchant account. One of the things that must be taken care in most case is to make sure you're site is in PCI (Payment Card Industry) compliance before the merchant account will be activated.

PCI Compliance for websites is great idea. It makes sure that merchant are securely encrypting data transmissions, notifying users of their privacy policy and letting users know of shipping and their refund and cancelation options (some of these thing I believe are beyond the scope of basic compliance but are requirements of the merchant account we were using). It's a great idea, but you can always count on great ideas to get screwed up somewhere along the way when corporations are involved. 

After sending the site over with a carefully crafted privacy policy (ok, not carefully crafted, but reasonably well written) and a concise refund policy, I received a message back that the pending application might be disallowed because it made no mention of shipping costs or returns. That would make sense, of course, if the site sold any actual products that needed to be shipped or returned. As it didn't, adding language about shipping and returns wouldn't make a lot of sense. 

As this was one of the requirements for "PCI Compliance", any sort of discussion would be out of the question. A few emails back and forth, along with some boiler plate language passed along, the site now has a fully non-sensical return and shipment policy. Much like a warning label on a Penut Butter : "Warning contains nuts", adding additional non-useful language just to make some legal-type happy does more than just add useless cruft to a site, if lowers the all important "signal-to-noise" ratio of a site, making it less likely visitors will find the information they need because of all the extra stuff needed.

On a happier note, if the site starts shipping goods sometime in the future, we'll have that boilerplate policy already in place..