PayPal or Google Checkout are both good ways to start out with. But depending on the volume of transactions and the amount of control you want you may want to go with your own merchant account. They are not hard at all to set up. Talk to your current bank to see if they have an arm that deals with merchant accounts. Most banks that offer business accounts either have their own or partner with a third party to provide the services to customers. Note that you will need an SSL certificate if you go with a merchant account. Id recommend VeriSign ( they will also most likely end up being your Payment Gateway if you do decide to set up your own merchant account). Their SSL certificates are a bit pricy, but the most trusted name in the business. You want to make sure you get a low processing fee (percent of the transaction that the bank ends up taking shoot for under 2% and a low per transaction fee (shoot for 20 cents or lower hard to find). After a lot of shopping around, we ended up going with Bank of America. Best of luck!
I worked (by this I mean marketing the product) on the textbook site for over a year before changing course about six months ago to our new direction. We have not started to market our current site. Send me some more info about yourself or contact me via IM if you would like to continue this.
So, I did not get an interview. The purpose of me entering was to network and connect with possible team members for my current project. I am a non technical founder who has gone at it with a team of hired individuals. I am a business guy at heart and understand tech from a product and design standpoint better than most, but I cant write code. I have invested over $100k of my own money into the project. I am looking to bring on board two rockstar programmers as cofounders.
The site is www.stuzo.com. We currently have close to 7,000 community members and the site has some revenues. The site was originally launched as an intercampus textbook exchange that enabled college students to buy and sell online and then to meet on campus for the exchange. The model and the site have gone through a complete overhaul over the past 6 months. The new site just went live today. We are tidying things up this week and will begin a grassroots on/offline marketing campaign next week. My goal is to connect people through the media they own, love, and want. There is still a lot of work that needs to be done to build out the vision.
Check out the site and drop me a line if you like what you see. You can reach me via aim/gtalk/skype. My name for all is stuzoguy.