A warning to anyone else who is currently researching this topic… In order to accept credit cards directly though your website, the banks now require that your website be PCI compliant. PCI stands for “Payment Cards Industry” and it’s a set of rules about the security of your server. Most hosting set ups (especially those powered by Plesk, CPanel, etc) are NOT PCI compliant by default. This can leave you liable for fraudulent transactions on your site!
You hosting company may be able to tell you more about this and if they can’t, consider changing hosts for your e-commerce site.
Using services like PayPal or Google Checkout can negate the requirements for PCI compliance because the customer enters credit card information into PayPal’s/ Google’s site and not directly onto yours. The problem is with the hefty chunk of the payment that these services take for themselves, which can have a real effect on your profit margins.
There is another alternative that I’ve used, which is a service from SagePay (others probably do something similar), whereby they allow you to embed an iframe into your site for payment processing. Very secure and looks a lot more professional than PayPal, etc.
The first step is to make sure you’ve got a merchant bank account (your high street bank can advise you on this), then sign up to SagePay. Very competitive rates, all kinds of cards accepted and they have integration with many popular CMS packages, e.g. Magento, Joomla.
I hope that information is helpful to somebody.
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