This is really good information, thank you! I didn't think about getting my own merchant account, seems like getting one is indeed a good idea.

And regards to FirstData, I am not planning on using them directly, but through Spreedly (who in turn just abstract the connection with FirstData and security and give a easy API to work with, but I may be wrong, this is simply from some information I gathered in the past day). Now that you mention it, I will look more deeply in to it.