I do not know the difference between a payment gateway/merchant account, except if I understand correctly, there's greater burden on the seller for a merchant account?

Right now I only use PayPal, but I am considering accepting cards directly but I don't want to pay an exorbitant amount of monthly fees; PCI in itself is grossly expensive..

- Authorize.net - Are their monthly fees really $10/mo? I can't seem to find this on their website.

- PayPal pro is about $30/mo, is there anything cheaper with the same ease of use/reliability of PayPal?

Ideally, I want to see/handle credit card data at it's absolute minimum. If I can entirely avoid it (such as; keep passing the buyer to a payment page hosted elsewhere -- I'd go for it).. too many buyers are turned off by PayPal (standard) for it to be realistic as my only payment option.

I can shed a bit of light for you. It's actually pretty simple when you break it down to it's pieces.

A merchant account is a bank account that holds funds captured from credit card sales. If you've ever wondered where money goes when you swipe your credit card at the time of the transaction - it goes into the merchant account of the company you are purchasing from.

The payment gateway has a different job. It is what connects to your card issuing bank and says "OK, John Smith wants to charge $100 to his credit card, does he have sufficient credit to pay for this purchase?" If so, the card issuing bank authorizes the transaction and the payment gateway knows to charge the sale. At this point the money needs to be deposited somewhere... into the merchant account!

That is e-commerce in a nutshell:

shopping carts keeps track of what user wans to buy

shopcart tells payment gateway how much to charge to credit card

Payment gateway checks to see if customer has sufficient credit for sale.

If so transaction is processed and funds from the sale are deposited into a merchant account.


I can't make recommendations about specific Canadian processors because it would be against the forum TOS, but I can help you with one bit of advice. Because you are a Canadian merchant Authorize.net is not going to be a good solution for you. Better to go with a Canadian (any Canadian) processor. If you go the US route they often require a US bank account, etc - although different banks have different rules and if you stick it out you may be able to find a way to use Authorize.net, but the path of least resistance to you will be to use a Canadian processor.

I recommend BluePay. You can also check with psigate and internet secure.

Check out Merchant-Accounts.ca. Helped me along with our Merchant Account.