I want to build a web site to sell subscriptions to a stock market advisory service. I will sell "subscriptions" to this service and authorized subscribers will be able to log in with a username and password to a page with the current data.

I want to:

1. Allow the visitor to click on a hyperlink and be able to submit a credit card for the subscription to be charged to.

2. The credit card will be billed every month for the subscription fee (recurring charge).

What do I need? I've seen "merchant account", "gateway", "credit card processer", etc.

What are the 1, 2, 3 steps I need to go through to get this set up?

Whew!

Basically a merchant account consists of a electronic payment gateway (Verisign, LinkPoint, Authorizenet.com, etc) and a CC processor.

I know with LinkPoint, you can submit data to their gateway thru the API or thru their secure gateway & tell the gateway to do recurring billing.

There is a thread here about Authorizenet.com: Subscription Based service with authorize.net (http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=291284)

And Payflow supports recurring billing as well: Recurring Billing Service from VeriSign (http://www.verisign.com/products/payflow/rcb/index.html)

Or... You could just get a 2checkout account, ignore the merchant account... this woule be better if you have a lower volume.