Muckhead's Chronicle

Consider checking out Terra Payments (http://www.terrapayments.com/solutions/creditcard.asp). They do all major credit cards, and you don't need to set up a merchant account for every card type.

With your business just starting out, it would be difficult to get a merchant account for each credit card, and its a long drawn out process. By using a service like this, you get over that hurdle quickly.

Some things to consider:

There is a $59 set up fee. (USD)
There is a "discount rate" (money they get to keep) of 3.5% on all CAD sales.
There is a "discount rate" (money they get to keep) of 2.75% on all USD sales.
There is a $0.35 fee for each transaction
There is a 5% holdback for 180 days in case of charge backs
You would need to set up your own ecommerce site
You would have to buy your own digital cert. You could buy one at InstantSSL (http://www.instantssl.com/ssl-certificate-products/ssl.html) for between $49-$69 USD per year.

So you need to figure in these costs to see if it makes sense to build a shopping cart this way. An alternative is to use a processing agent, but then they are going somewhere else to buy the product, which isn't the most eligent way of doing things.

A point about the discount rate. Its highly competitive. If you check out how much PayPal takes off, its quite similar. This is where they make their money on the transactions, and to compete it seems similar services are around the same price.

YMMV

Thanks Dude!

I was thinking about using an agent, but this is the way to go. I need to look into making my own ecommerce site, a little nervous about setting something like that up without the knowledge then getting hacked and burnt crispy.

That sound like the way to go though.