I am a little dense in the head sometimes so please forgive me. I have a client who insists on using a merchant account they have instead of paypal. I guess the confusion for me is differentiating between a merch account and a payment gateway. And does SCC allow for merch account setups (is that what authorrize.net is?). If not, does anyone know if the new features in the pro version will have this? Maybe just some general clarity about the merchant account would be good since I have always only used paypal.

A gateway is a service to handle the online payment transaction. PayPal, 2Checkout, Google Checkout, and Authorized.net are all gateway services.

A merchant account is a banking business account.

The gateway handles the online transaction and deposits the funds into your merchant account.

That makes sense. So how then does one use a merchant account and attach it to a store. For example, this is what they want, when you go to check out it should just say visa, mastercard, amex, etc. not "paypal"?

Can the cart program or the upcoming pro version do this?

You connect the shopping cart to the gateway and the gateway connects to the merchant account. It is the only way to do it. You choose which gateway you want to use. CC Cart allows multiple gateways that can be offered together to give more choices to the buyer or use alone.

An example would be to offer Google Checkout and PayPal together to offer more choices. They don't require you to use a merchant account and transfer funds into your personal checking account. These transfers are not automatic and take a few days. They charge a higher percentage rate too. Low volume sales usually take this route to avoid monthly fees.

Another example would be to only use a true gateway service like Authorize.net that automatically deposits funds into your merchant account, which is mandatory (no personal checking accounts). The funds are immediately available. They offer lower percentage rates but charge other monthly or annual fees but it's cheaper if you sell higher volume.

Great, thanks.

You're welcome. I edited the post below to better explain things.

That was a clear explanation. Thank you.

What is still unclear to me is how you create something like, say, Amazon.com where, when you go to checkout you only have to select your card and put your number in. Your not taken off-site to a third party application. How are those funds being processed, when one is not using a third-party vendor? My client thinks this is a more professional way to do things. I tried to explain to him that I don't think the amount of sales he is predicting to generate warrants using anything other than a third party, but he is convinced that anything like paypal, or google checkout looks too unprofessional.

That is an example of a true gateway in use. You keep the customer on your site throughout the entire payment process. The customer enters the credit card info on your server and connects to the gateway behind the scenes for payment authorization. This requires an SSL certificate for security and you are responsible for record keeping and everything. The gateway simply authorizes the transaction and deposits the funds into your merchant account.

I don't know if the CC Cart handles onsite payments like that. I think it transfers the customer to use the gateway service secure server. CC has the Authorize.net module, but I think it transfers the customer to Authorize.net’s secure server to transact the payment. But I could be wrong.

Thanks for your help. Very enlightening!

Eric, I once again edited my last post. I had used merchant account in place of gateway. I have to slow down on the multi-tasking and proofread my posts.