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Storm,
PayPal works, if you can live with the down sides the guys mentioned. The problem is that most E-commerce customers nowadays have paypal accounts and want to use them. If you use paypal they have a couple of different types of accounts, both business and buyer. Some verified and some not. You can tell the customer up front that the transaction will be treated like a check transaction if it's unverified. The simplest user account that allows sending and receiving money, I forget what they call it, but it works fine for me. To me there is no need to go to some high end business account until the business dictates it. There are a couple other companies that do what paypay does...but most of your customers will not use them.
Paypal works a couple of different ways depending on the account you set up. The most common is just operated from the e-mail associated with the account. You provide the customer with your email address and they go to their account and transfer funds to that email account. That can all be handled through email or over the phone. You can help the process along by having the paypal link take them to the account login screen at paypal. WARNING!!! When you put you associated email account on the web page, do it as a gif or jpg image. DO NOT just have it as plain text inside your html code. The bad guys have web bots whose only purpose for being is to go out and find that stuff. END WARNING!!! The other way is one of the higher end paypal accounts that will provide you with a link to handle all that stuff. The customer is automatically taken to sign in and transfer to your account.
As to credit card transactions. Setting up an online card management system on your site is crazy. It exposes you to all kinds of legal issues that you just do not want as a small business owner.
There are several companies that will handle that sort of transaction on line for you. You just link to them so that when the customer clicks that payment method they are taken to a secure site, maintained by professionals. Just be sure to tell them plainly that they will be redirected to a secure site so they don't FREAK OUT and hit cancel because it scares them. The fees for different companies vary. Some charge a flat fee. Some have sign up fees and get a percentage. Some just charge a percentage for each transaction. You'll just have to do some research and see which one works best for you.
The other option is the phone verification system that George mentioned. There are a few of them and they take their cut in exactly the same way as the internet companies do it. Again, you'll just have to do some research and choose which one makes the most sense for you.
Hope that's of some use.
chiger,
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