Payment processors

What's the preferred payment processor? There are so many options. I'm going to use either osCommerce or X-Cart.

One thought is that Paypal is well known by common folk. Are they a good choice, considering that? Authorize.net seems to be popular on the forums here.

Paypal is probably the most widely used online payment gateway, however, there are many problems and lawsuits with them. (I, personally, have never had a problem, but if you do a search for paypal lawsuit, or something to that effect, you'll receive a lot of links). Authorize.net is the next choice on the list, and they are popular, and I've not heard anything bad about them. The reason most people use Paypal, is it's free. But I would go with Authorize.net if you don't mind paying the fees (setup, monthly, etc).

Authorize.Net is not a payment processor. They are just a payment gateway. You still need to have a merchant account for it to work.

As for whether you should use a third party provider or true merchant account all depends on several factors including monthly volume and business needs.

What country are you located in?

You can process payments with Authorize.net.

Of course you can. That's what gateways do. But you need a merchant account to go with it as as the gateway needs somewhere to send the payment information.

Payments gateways act like credit card terminals do in a retail store. They take the credit card transaction and send it to the processing bank to process the sale. Without the merchant account there is no one to send the transaction to.

I know what a merchant account is. He had asked for a payment processor, not a merchant account. So I had responded accordingly.

Since the OP mentioned Paypal I am assuming by payment processor they mean someone to process the payment and pay them. Technically Authorize.Net doesn't process payments (and therefor isn't a payment processor). They just pass them on to someone who does.

Well I'm ignorant on these topics. Basically I need the whole deal, a company that will take the card info from the cart and charge it.

I'm in the US.

Then you will need a third party processor like Paypal, 2checkout, Google checkout, or Worldpay amongst others.