A common form of handling credit card transactions, online or offline is to establish your website with a Merchant account with your card company or bank.

Having this authorization allows your business to take card payments in person and online. The advantages of this option is that you can take payment in various forms and have more control. The main disadavantages are that the merchant rate you pay for every sales is high (unless volumes justify a preferred rate) and there may be considerable custom programming required to carefully integrate with the payment system. Also, procssing different cards may require different procedures.