Online Business question?

I'm trying to get an idea of what the cost is to start an online business, not sure if you guys can answer but all info is appreciated. I'm looking into a credit card solutions for payment processing and the site I went to doesn't really give a clear answer. Basically if a website is brings in let's say $5,000/month would anyone know about how much it would run me to pay the credit card processing group. Is this a monthly rate? I know this probably varies but I'm just trying to get an idea of how pricing works with this service.

It is hard to determine what your merchant account costs will be by just giving the total transaction of $5,000. You need to give information on:

- transaction fee (the more sales you have, the higher the transaction fee -- so there is a difference in this fee if your $5000 sales can be broken down into 5 transactions as against smaller lower priced 500 transactions)

- discount rate (this is typically high for online merchants because of the condition called "card not present")

-- average ticket price (you'll pay more in merchant account fees if your items are lower priced because you'll pay more in transaction fees)

- number of units sold

There are merchant account cost calculators out there that you can try. Check out this one at http://www.merchantaccountforum.com/calc...

Starting an online business is not at all a great deal!!! However making it profitable is the real challenge for any online marketer.If you want to make money online, that's great, but you need a system. You need to follow the strategies which are aleready tried n tested & are used by the champions who could make their fortune on the internet. Don't re-invent the wheel - don't make the mistake of wasting time and money in developing a product.Because you know nothing (I believe so) at the moment about internet marketing. So you must work with someone who can prove their system - be cautious and careful. You need to crawl first before you can walk or run - the best way to learn is to become an Affiliate Marketer. The main advantage with affiliate marketing is that -suppose the product you are promoting is not selling well due to some reason, you can drop that product & chose something else to sell.In short as an affiliate you are essentially a free-lance marketer - not bound by long-term contracts having a freedom to review / revise / remould your plans as per the demand in the market . (To see the changing demand in the market have a look at these http://buzzyahoo.notlong.com &
http://buzz-google.notlong.com )

There are lots of people out there there -- people just like you -- who are enjoying the financial freedom that comes with successful affiliate marketing.

I checked into credit card processing once and i thought it was a bit steep for what i was selling, I think they wanted like $300 a year up front , plus transaction fees and they also got a percentage of sales so i just went with paypal, it's cheaper and easier to use i think
But if you need a domain name and hosting you should check out these guys. It's free for seven days and cancel if your not satisfied. after the free trial it's only $10 bucks a month, but you get a domain name and 100MB webspace and 10 e-mail addresses , it's not a bad deal plus you make money with them too just from being an affiliate but here's a link
http://www.website.ws/kvmlm2/hosting.dht...

You might find this four part article series helpful, plus it'll help you understand the industry jargon:

http://www.ecommercebase.com/article/494
http://ecommercebase.com/article/495
http://ecommercebase.com/article/500
http://www.ecommercebase.com/article/501