Strong brands require a relationship built on trust. Customers must feel safe and secure when transacting with your brand. For this reason, security is fundamental to ecommerce. PCI Compliance is our industry’s way of verifying security standards for organizations that handle any online payments. PCI Compliance goes well beyond the software itself, creating dependencies on how the software is managed, deployed, and hosted.

While Magento provides the ability to deploy PCI compliant storefronts, you as the vendor are responsible for ensuring that your site is safe and secure. Ensuring PCI compliance is costly and time-consuming. Since the burden of securing server data is entirely yours, it creates headaches that distract from your business.

As an open-source solution, Magento is also prone to malware. Security breaches to the software itself are a regular concern. Over 10,000 Magento sites fell victim to the Guruncsite malware in 2015. Google was forced to blacklist over 8,000 storefronts in the first 90 days of the breach alone. As the most recent Trustwave Global Security Report found:

“In the ecommerce space, the Magento open-source ecommerce platform was the target of choice for attackers, with Magento installations accounting for 85% of compromised systems.”

With Shopify Plus, your site will be hosted and protected in full compliance with Level 1 PCI DSS. This includes:

• Maintaining a secure network
• Protecting cardholder data
• Maintaining a vulnerability management program
• Implementing strong access control measures
• Regularly monitoring and testing networks
• Maintaining an information security policy

Where most ecommerce websites use SSL encryption technology to protect a shopper’s personal information during checkout, Shopify covers the entire online experience. Once your certificate is activated, all traffic will be redirected from HTTP to encrypted HTTPS.

Magento has an aggressive development cycle for its 2.x roadmap, with plans to deploy multiple point releases and security patches in a given year. Like many on-premise solutions, new releases can pose a challenge when the platform has been extended or customized.

With each release, the client must organize a true project to understand how it might impact the existing code base. Depending on the situation, upgrades like these can take days or weeks. In many instances, the client may need to rewrite existing customizations, requiring QA and load testing for each individual release.

Shopify Plus removes the need for upgrades, patches, and point releases. The platform is designed to allow retailers to launch new features as they become available from within the Shopify admin. This saves time and money typically associated with upgrades and patches, and also removes the opportunity costs that software deployment can bring along with it.