Accepting credit card payments whether its online, via a mobile device, or any other solution can be quite confusing. First let me explain by giving you some background info on how the payment processing industry works as a whole:

There are two different services that a merchant needs in order to accept payments whether accepting a payment online or via a mobile device: 1) a Gateway Account and a 2) Merchant Account. A Gateway Account (ie Authorize.net or PayPal Payments Pro) is simply an authorization service for Internet credit card transactions and is used to facilitate communication between the business, the card issuer and the business’s bank. A Merchant Account is what allows a business to actually accept credit cards as payment for goods and services and in essence acts as a contract between the business owner and the bank defining the rules on how products will be bought, sold and paid for.

Authorize.net is far and away the most popular and most trusted Gateway Account. That is why I recommend all of my clients to use Authorize.net as their Gateway Account. As for Merchant Accounts, there are many reputable sources including Intuit GoPayment, Roam, Bluypay, Chase Paymentech etc…

What services like Square, Paypal, Cornerstone and Amazon do is more or less “bundle” the Merchant and Gateway account together allowing merchants who sell a relatively low volume of goods/services to processes transactions in an extremely hassle free way. However, you pay for this ease of use in the form of higher transaction fees as well as not being able to host payment processing on your website (as you are well aware) for security reasons.

We recommend you use Authorize.net for all Gateway Accounts. Most Merchant Account providers like Intuit will sync with and work in conjunction with Authorize.net. This allows the mobile payments and the website payments to be viewable all in the same place through your Authorize.net account hosted on their website.

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