Getting Started

In order to accept credit cards on you’re website, you’ll need one of the following….

1.) Your own merchant account and payment gateway. Authorize.net is a good gateway, but you still need a merchant account. If you go through authorize.net directly, it will be more expensive. The best thing to do is to find a authorized auth.net reseller that will give you a merchant account and payment gateway for nothing up front. This is a pretty common promotion if you get the merchant account and gateway together.

With these types of modules, you collect the cc info on your website, and programatically process the payment through the gateway. The money lands in your merchant account, and is batch deposited in your business account once per day.

The standard CC module you are using just collects the CC info, but nothing is processed. This module is for the #3 type of processing cc’s below.

2.) A third party processor, such as paypal, 2checkout (big mistake here). There are a few others. During checkout, the customer is taken to a third party website, where they make the payment. The money lands in your account with the third party. Usually there is slightly more restrictions on how you withdrawl the money to your account, and you have less protection in the event of fraud.

3.) Off line, or near line processors. This is where you have a merchant account and a virtual terminal. So you collect the CC information on your website, and then have to manually enter it in on your vitual or real physical cc terminal. It’s a little more manual, but it’s usually alot cheaper this way.