So your serious about doing business over the web, you have a product or a service to sell, then a merchant account is what you are looking for.
Basicaly a merchant accout is like a ” in real life” business bank account but on the web. So it is a virtual bank account. A merchant account allows you to accept credit cards payments on your site. As you open an account with one of the company, your bank might offer that service, the money you make by making sells over the web is then transfered to your real bank account.

You’ve probably come across websites that sell things on the web and deliver the goods to your door. As you can notice on these sites, they have shopping carts.
Shopping carts are a script that will take the order of the user and then send that information to your merchant account to validate the users transaction. So shopping carts is the solution for you if you think doing business on the web by selling stuff like:

• real life goods
• services
• E-books
• Etc…

Merchant account are also needed if you plan on building a website with a paying member area. Think of all the websites that need you to become a member by paying a fee. Like:

• Some music partition sites
• mp3 sites
• Movies sites
• Adult entertainment sites
• Etc…