If you run a business chances are you already gone through the steps of accepting credit cards. In todays business you may loose lot of money if you don't accept credit cards.

From my experience I have not seen much people understand the whole process.

There are several parties involved behind the whole process. Typically parties involved are:

- A bank where you have to open a merchant account. Money will come and go from this account as you charge or return on credit cards.

- A  company that process all the credit card transactions. Not all of them process all kinds of cards. Some may take Visa, MasterCard but not American Express or vice versa. You have to make sure they process the cards you like to accept at your business.

- If you want to process credit cards online, e.g. a website, in real time there may be another company involved which will provide the software etc to be integrated to your site.

Generally there are companies who can take care of all of the above for you. And all of them will charge you for their service.

Rates can be tricky

A few pennies will make a big difference at the end of the day. Best practice will be getting rates from different companies. On decision making care should be taken to find out the cost of each transaction by summing up the cost at the bank and other parties involved. A few penny difference may become several thousand in total yearly depending on your transaction volume.

Return charge

Returns are usual things in business. When a customer returns a product you may have to give the money back on credit card(unless you have store credit policy or so). Cost of return transaction is another factor you should look at before making a decision.

msmerchantaccount.com

Today I came to know about this site msmerchantaccount.com which processes credit cards for both online and offline. They even do international credit card processing. International credit cards are little bit more risky, so more expensive. Check them at http://www.msmerchantaccount.com