Hi, We are going to start accepting payments using a real online merchant account. To this point we have been just using Paypal. I'm trying to get a thorough understanding of how all of the different components work together such as the: 1. Merchant account 2. Payment Gateway 3. Virtual terminal 4. Am I missing anything else? I'm also trying to get an understanding of the associated fees: 1. discount rate (I understant that one since PP charges that) 2. transaction fee (I understand that since PP charges that) 3. service fee 4. gateway fee 5. vt fees Finally I want to find the best company to work with. So far it looks like Linkpoint and Authorize.net are the leaders in the industry when it comes to reputation, stability and pricing. And out of the two Linkpoint's pricing looks the best out of the two, because they don't charge an additional fee for recurring billing whereas authorize does. Can anyone shed any additional light into the two companies, as far as past experiences etc? Thanks alot in advance - this is very important to us, so any help will be greatly appreciated.