Paypal - Credit Cards Online

Credit card merchant accounts are complicated, why not just use paypal to accept payment?

It's simple. People trust it. It's not that expensive. Paypal's fees start at:
2.9% + $0.30/transaction for under $3K per month
When you're above $100K per month, it's 1.9% and $.30 per transaction.

There are two plans: Website payment standard and website payment pro. With pro, there are PCI compliance issues. I suspect that the difference between the two is whether the customer says on my page to pay or gets passed over to the paypal website to pay.

Credit cards online might be a lot simpler with paypal. I'm definitely paying more than 1.9% plus $.30 per transaction.

Joomla integration with credit cards

The site that I'm looking to add credit card processing to is based on Joomla.  It's funny that of all the the credit card sales people that have called me, none have asked the basic questions that most matter.  Mostly, we want the technology to work smoothly.

There is a joomla component called AEC which is developed (I'm not kidding) by the GlobalNerds.

  It's likely we'll use AEC as our integration module.  So, for our initial credit card processor, we're likely to pick whichever one the AEC people (who are going to the implementation for us) suggests as the simplest.  

AEC is a component that handles integration with subscriptions and payment processing.   Later, to keep costs low as our sales rise, we'll switch to Google Checkout (if they maintain their deal to credit adsense marketing expenses against credit card fees)