My organization is looking into building a ticket ordering web site for our local sports events. We don't want to use VeriSign's Payflow services because we have individual bank accounts for each sport we offer and VeriSign can't redirect funds to the correct account (at least I don't think they can/do).

What we are thinking of doing is to collect ticket quantities along with credit card information and just handle the payment processing ourselves offline. However, we want a secured server to store this information.

I'm guessing a shared hosting solution would not be the way to go. Can anyone please steer me in the right direction?

thanks.

Do they(events) have different merchant ID's with the bank?

As Morocco mentions above... that is really the question to ask.

The Verisign Payflow payment gateway is merely that - a gateway. The funds deposits are not handled by the gateway but rather your merchant account.

If you want funds to go into multiple bank accounts, you will definitely need multiple merchant ID's (MID's) with the appropriate bank account mapped to each of them.

You will also then need multiple payment gateway accounts - each one mapped to a different MID.

A less expensive option would be to have one main MID and then have your accounting department transfer funds directly, unless there is some legal or other reason requiring the multiple accounts to receive the funds directly.

Are multiple payment gateway accounts necessary? Can one gateway account be mapped to multiple MIDs?

Well - the system you use to send through the transaction requests would need to identify which account it was for, so I don't see any way that you could get away with one gateway when you have multiple target accounts.

I am not aware of any gateway system that supports more than one MID per gateway ID either.