It's not very easy to make the transition from a real business you can touch and feel to an online business that just exists in an endless web of information. I'm 47-years-old, so to me, a small business is one of those locally-owned corner shops with velvet Elvis paintings and Slim Jims on the counter. It's a place you can go to feel right at home. It's a place that I took over from my father, who took it over from his father. It's also a place that quickly went out of business when Wal-Mart, Kohl's, and Target all came to the same area at once.

There's nothing you can do. You can't compete with sweatshop products and slave wages with benefits. No one wants a hotdog while gassing their car up if they can get an entire McDonalds meal while shopping for cheap socks. There's just no room for the little man. Like a lot of people in my position, the only thing I know how to do is sell goods. I moved to the internet and decided to try my hand at selling a product. After racking my brain, I decided to take the big-money store route and sell products to people for an always-low price. I would purchase an entire garage full of items at a wholesale price and sell them off – that was my plan.

Of course, any plan needs to be thought out. When my grandfather opened his store, he didn't need anything but a gas pump and a good recipe for hotdog chili. Within 5 years, his gas station/store was the most popular in the town. Obviously, people can't smell that chili online, so I needed another draw. I worked with marketing gurus about how to generate traffic, and hired 3 separate website builders to install Flash software to make my site look fancy. None of them bothered to tell me that I would need a merchant site to handle my credit card payments from customers.

The payment solution site I chose to go with was FreeAuthNet. They promised to set my merchant account up with no hassle, and, the best part, no charge at all. I set up a merchant account and a credit card account and received the software for free. And if that wasn't a sweet enough deal, they also offer some of the lowest rates in the industry for transactions. Honestly, I don't understand everything on their site. All of this reselling and re-buying and affiliate stuff is lost on me. The one thing I do know, however, is that my customers' transactions are instantaneous and I've yet to have a payment fail.

FreeAuthNet offers industry-leading security and a system that is very easy to integrate. Their reliable and stable services see to it that every major credit card is always accepted without a hassle or a waiting period. The rates pretty much speak for themselves, with a free setup fee, application fee, programming fee, customer service fee, and free check recovery service and phone software. You'll only pay 24-cent per transaction, which is a penny lower than most of the cheapest out there. A penny doesn't seem like a lot until you make 10,000 transactions.

For everything they're offering, FreeAuthNet is undoubtedly one of the best around. It's always easy to set up their software, and their customer support team is more than happy to help with any issues you might be having. It's not my old family store's way of doing things, but I guess a man should change with the times and not the other way around.

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