I want to offer credit card payment on my website and was wondering whats the best (or prefered) way to do so?
I know I could use Google checkout, paypal, etc. but this is not what i am looking for. I am looking for a simple basic CC payment which supports all the different credit cards only.
There are a lot of solutions out there. A couple to start with: Authorize.net and Payment Tech
If you don't want to use an external processor, this is hard. The security issues are huge, and I can't seriously imagine a bank allowing you to do it. I would strongly recommend you use Paypal, Google Checkout or WorldPay, or whatever payment processing system is provided/recommended by your bank.
IF I were in the US, I'd use google checkout. It's quite cheap and it's a brand I (and many customers) trust.
Other than that, there's a bunch of possibilities. Stay away from anything owned by Digital River, though. Seems that FastSpring is relatively good, but expensive.
I've implemented Authorize.NET a couple times. It works very well, and I believe their rates are reasonable.
You do need to manage your own SSL certificate etc, and comply with PCI standards, but its a small price to pay to get away from the evils of paypal.
I'd rummage around on Visa for the answer, digging up a reliable third party company; I would not by any means write my own CC authorization code; to my mind, that sounds like a great big invite to hackers.
Paypay is reasonably reliable, I know that.
Check out Amazon, Ebay, Yahoo, etc., for their solutions. They might license out their shopping cart software(for a fee, of course).
Depends entirely on who you are.
If your company is sufficiently established that it can get an internet merchant account from a bank, do so if your transaction volumes are greater than "very, very small". If you're turning over more than £1000 per month (or say $1000/month USD or something), then get a merchant account.
If you're NOT turning over that much, then first figure out how to get your turnover that high, because otherwise you're not going to be in business for long.
Internet merchant accounts not charge much less commission than the aforementioned "Hold on to the cash" PSPs, but they also give you the money sooner and are generally far more reasonable to work with.
There are many gateway providers which can work with the banks and the banks themselves typically offer their own. You can choose whatever combination best suits you from a technical perspective.
Disclaimer: This information is based on my limited experience integrating payment providers IN THE UK. It may not apply to other countries (or even here!)
There's a lot of complexity in accepting credit cards, which is why PayPal and Google Checkout are so popular -- they take care of much of the complexity for you.
Another company that offers even more than PayPal is Kagi. I strongly recommend you watch their short promotional video, because it outlines all the components needed to process credit cards the way you want to -- payment gateways, payment processors, merchant accounts, etc.; I think it might convince you to go with a different approach.
There's absolutely no reason you need to deal with storing credit card data on your servers if all you want to do is accept credit cards. Lots of folks that have never implemented a non Paypal/Google Checkout system will try to scare you with talk of it being a terribly huge task, but your code just needs to take an encrypted CC from the client and pass it to the gateway. It never needs to live in your DB and your risk is minimized because of it.
I'd say the line between using Paypal buttons and using a gateway is simply a choice of if you want the customer to check out on your site or on someone else's. That's it. It's not that much more risk, since all you need to do is buy an SSL cert and use a reputable cart system like Magento, Ubercart for Drupal, etc. There will always be effort involved.