If you are doing less than $10,000 / month in credit card processing we suggest you use one of the more popular services that does not require an "individual merchant account".  The rates are all going to be close to similar. if you are doing international business, that may be a differentiating factor. 

1. These businesses use to be called "aggregators" because they were aggregating transactions under a single merchant account and then paying out separately to their merchants themselves.  Getting to the point to where that was allowed took a long time. They had to prove they could manage the risk. Technology helped with that a great deal. These include providers like Square, Stripe, Paypal and others.  

If you are doing more than $10,000 / month in credit card processing, it would be worth shopping around for better pricing, but make sure they offer the simple payment page you need and/or other options you can or are getting from the aggregators. 

By default, your credit card processor will sweep money into your checking account nightly. While this sounds great, it can be annoying because it adds unnecessary transactions to your working checking account.  It also is useless for reporting unless you can custom configure it because the cutoffs for the nightly transfers are typically at around 2pm in the afternoon. Thus tomorrows deposits are NOT equal to today's sales if you are open past 2pm. We suggests two strategies to deal with this better. 

1. If a processor offers it, change the setting to normalize the transfers . Insted of using a 2pm cut off, ask them to use Midnight even if it means the transfer is then a day later.  That would allow you to reconcile with your daily sales easier. We have not checked to see if this is available with the processors as we did it differently. 

2. Change the setting with your processer to require you to manually trigger the transfer.  If you do this, you could transfer the exact amount processed for a given day,  week or month and get a better feel for actual sales in your bookkeeping system although it would be delayed reporting. 

3. Establish a second checking account only for incoming credit card processing.  Then on routine basis transfer that money into your working checking account. The second checking account is NOT part of your Bookkeeping System. Think of it as a cash box.  When you transfer money from your deposit account to your working checking account it is counted as a sale in your Bookkeeping records