At the end of the day the most important aspect of your business is making it profitable and keeping it safe for longevity. You can have a beautiful site, market it well, and get all the traffic you need, but if you can’t accept electronic payments your site is dead on the web. Choosing the best method of accepting payments may be the single most important decision you’ll make to ensure your great business plan turns into a moneymaker.
Basically, webmasters in the U.S. have two options. The most common billing ideology is to use a third-party billing company that has been approved by Visa. There are two main U.S. Internet Payment Service Providers (IPSPs) that provide billing for the high-risk (MCC5967, the card association category for online digital content) digital content entertainment industry — Epoch and CCBill. The other option is to use a gateway service and process transactions to your own merchant account. The two best-known U.S. gateway services are Jettis and NetBilling.