I have had a few different businesses with merchant accounts and they all stink. They nickle and dime you to death. $29.95 a month for this, $.20 a transaction, 2.95% of transactions, $20 per chargeback, minimum account activity or another charge etc.
Unless you have good personal credit, do not even try a standard merchant agreement, they do a pretty thorough back ground and credit check.
Depending on what you sell, many merchant accounts dont want your online business. Anything having to do with an online 'service' is going to get you charged a higher fee. Anything with ongoing monthly or quarterly subscriptions is going to hit you for more. Anything with casino or porn dont even bother. If you sound funny on the phone or have a dog barking in the background you are going to get charged more. The whole ordeal with trying to accept credit cards is a very shady business.
Paypal is pretty easy to set-up but the fees are pretty high. If you do any adwords at all, Google checkout might be a good option or even free. Never used them so no idea how difficult or easy it might be to get an account.
I just read about these
guys in Forbes. They charge a much lower percentage but no idea how restrictive they are in getting set-up.
Just my $.02 but the internet is the perfect opportunity to really set up a dynamic third party currency. I know Beenz and others have tried it, but that does not mean it was not a good idea, just might have been a little a head of the game.
Matt Cutts made a really small blog post recently about Visa's 17% of total sales in this country and did some math, the industry is an oligopoly with no incentive to compete on price. Heck AMEX manages to charge even higher premiums than Visa.
