As online store owners should know, July 1, 2010 was the required deadline for all payment applications to become PA-DSS Validated.  This affects all payment gateway providers, swipe terminals and shopping card vendors, including Miva Merchant.

 PA-DSS Validation is different from PCI-DSS Compliance. Both are implemented and governed by the PCI Security Council, but in order to maintain your PCI-DSS Compliance as a merchant, you must be running PA-DSS Validated shopping cart software.

 Miva Merchant 5.5 store owners can feel comfort in knowing that their shopping cart has been PA-DSS Validated. The challenge remains for Miva 4.x owners because Miva Merchant will not and has no plans to validate the older versions of Miva Merchant.

 Those 4.x merchants should consider upgrading their store. BZA can assist merchants with the process. To encourage store owners to upgrade, Miva Merchant is offering a free Miva Merchant 5.5 upgrade to qualified Miva Merchant 4.x license owners. For more information or to see if you qualify please contact us.

 As I was checking our Google Analytics, I was particularly interested in the mobile device traffic to our web site. Approximately 5.2 % of all traffic to http://www.bza.com is coming from a mobile device. But what I found even more interesting is that in December our mobile traffic was 1.37% , followed by January at 3.2%. When you crank all the numbers it equates to the fact the our mobile traffic is doubling each month over the past three months. That is amazing! I will add that we have not done any mobile marketing campaigns but as you might know we introduced our mobile web design and development services in February.  When you drill down into the data I can see 71% of our mobile visitors are using an Iphone followed by 12% on Android.  Surprisingly Blackberry makes up only 5% of our mobile visitors. The mobile web is not merely a fashion trend; it is one that will be with us for a very long time.

With just over 40% of Americans currently owning a smartphone the number of on-the-run web surfers continues to growth. BZA is now helping companies gain customer loyalty, increase exposure and web traffic by developing mobile websites.

According to Barbara Zaccone, President and Founder of BZA, “The majority of websites are not optimized for mobile use.  This allows companies to gain a significant competitive advantage by mobilizing their web site.”  

 According to a recent Gartner Group report by year-end 2010, 1.2 billion people will carry handsets capable of rich, mobile commerce providing a rich environment for the convergence of mobility and the Web.  

Although larger organizations can afford custom App development for both the Iphone and Android platforms, small and medium organization can choose a more affordable browser based solution.

Zaccone added, “I encourage web site owners to take a look at their existing web site on mobile devices and see how their site renders. Most people will quickly notice that browsing a desktop web site on a mobile phone is a frustrating experience.”

For more information see BZA’s mobile web design services

BZA recently launched a new website for food ingredient manufacturer EFCO Products of Poughkeepsie, New York located at http://www.efcoproducts.com . EFCO is a leading manufacturer and supplier of ingredients for bakeries and foodservice companies worldwide.  The site gives bakers and chefs convenient access to detailed product information. As innovators of new products, it was important for Efco to be able to update the website quickly and efficiently. BZA provided Efco with a content editing solution that allows them to update their product pages, news and more.

At the core of EFCO’s success is their commitment to providing the highest level of customer service. EFCO’s customers can now go to the recipe blog section of the EFCO website to get ideas, tips and recipes that put the “Yum” in their food creations. Recipes are now indexed in a database and easily retrieved through search or category navigation.

Through BZA’s site optimization effort, EFCO has been able to increase their search engine traffic significantly since the website launch. With their old site they could not be found for any of their targeted keywords or phrases.