In order to offer your customers real time, secure credit card processing over the Internet, you need a Merchant Services Provider which offers this service. Not all credit card processing services can process transactions over the Internet, and not all contracts with such providers allow for it. Usually, for technical reasons, you can't automatically process Internet transactions via merchant services intended for ordinary "brick and mortar" stores.

Users of CatalogIntegrator Lite Cart, who also have credit card processing service for a regular, non-Internet business, may not find that a disadvantage, because they can simply retrieve their orders through the web browser Admin Interface, and run the orders through by hand, in their usual way.

Real time, secure, over-the-web transaction processing, requires a merchant services provider. It may, depending on the provider or the particular service, and also might require a secure server for some of your cart pages. (Some providers offer a checkout page on their own secure server, so that the site owner does not necessarily need a secure server).

Such merchant services are often loosely referred to as a "Merchant Account". This is not a regular bank account where you deposit money and write checks against your deposits. It is more like an administrative service. Sometimes it is called a "merchant number." Furthermore, the merchant account is only part of what is needed. You also need the credit card processing service, and a business bank account where the payments for your sales will be deposited.

And, you will need for your Internet shopping cart to either allow you to extract the credit card information (as in CatalogIntegrator Lite) or to be set up with an interface page, which will convert the cart data into the correct format to be transferred and authenticated through your Merchant Account provider (as in the interfaces available for the CatalogIntegrator Full Cart) in real-time over the Internet. In real-time transaction processing, the money is automatically marked to be transferred, at the time the order is placed, and normally completed in the daily merchants batch of transactions.