It's important to accept credit cards in an e-commerce store. To do this, you need a merchant account and a payment gateway. A merchant account is basically a bank account for collecting proceeds from credit card transactions. A payment gateway is a communication tool that enables you to authorize and manage credit card payments.

For our online business we'll definitely need to accept credit cards and have begun the process of finding a company to do it. When I setup our bank account National City offered to contact us with information for merchant services, but it doesn't seem like they offer the payment gateway service. I think for simplicity sake we may try to keep the two providers one in the same, or at least go with someone like Authorize.net who offers payment gateway services and contracts with a group of common merchant account providers they work with often.

Another issue we need to take into account is how the payment gateway will interact with our online shopping cart system. We'd probably like it to integrate to a deep enough point that our customers will be able to stay on our site and maintain some coherency about which company they are dealing with instead of being redirected to a payment processor's site.

So, the investigation has begun and we'll tell you more about it later... probably after we choose one.