What is the best eCommerce Credit Card Processing System

Understanding the Basics:

First you need to understand how it works

Option1: A merchant account
It comes with several fees. Lot of people don't list all the fees involved so we had to search a lot to compare apples to apples.

Here is a good FAQ about the various merchant fees involved. http://www.merchantseek.com/introguideprint.htm

(i) Setup Fees and Monthly Fees: My goal was to stay away from upfront setup fees and fixed monthly fees as we didn't know what our volume will be so we didn't want to pay $100+ for setup and $20/month without knowing what we'll make per month.

(ii)The second fee is transaction % fee and transaction fee in $/cents. Even 20cents per transaction becomes big if your average customer sale is small. Otherwise this doesn't matter much.

This site is a good search toot to find a merchant acount that works for your business http://www.merchantseek.com/index.shtml

Option 2: Paypal account

I was under the impression that a paypal merchant account will offer only paypal method of payment. They have several options that offers paypal plus standard credit card processing for ecommerce sites.

I like the paypal standard account https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_wp-standard-overview-outside
Here is a good comparision of all the options at paypalhttps://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_feature-and-pricing-comparison

Software Integration Time and Costs
One factor you should consider apart from the fees is the effort (tech resources, time) involved in integrating any of these credit card processing options to your site.

Authorize.net is the most famous merchant gateway software and integrated with Mambo, the coolest Content Management System ever. You'll find many of the options on the net are Authorize.net dealers.

A good referal I've got from a friend was for:

npc.net - However, I haven't been able to get any response back from them to find out about the prices. They just don't want to email or call me back.