Internet shopping is bigger than ever. You can find anything and everything for sale online. Many times, you can find it cheaper online than anywhere else. Internet shopping offers so much more than a discounted price tag, though.

Imagine a shopping mall where there are no lines, where there are no jammed parking garages, and no pushy sales clerks. This is no land of make believe. It is Internet, where you can discover unprecedented selection, convenience, and opportunities. Online shopping gives you luxury of browsing hundreds of stores from your living room, while saving on time and frustration. It provides you chance to compare prices to your heart's delight on a near limitless selection of brands and models.

For even more benefits, try your hand at classifieds and auction Web sites. These sites are like yard sales and flea markets rolled into one. Unlike retail shopping sites, they offer:

Access to super secondary markets. Take your pick of secondhand or brand-new wholesale goods at steeply discounted prices. The vendors at classifieds sites can get away with it because they aren't paying high rent for a storefront or a warehouse. And in many cases, you're not paying taxes.

Tools to locate unique and rare collectibles. Imagine a classifieds site to be like a sunken pirate boat, laden with cultural artifacts, hard-to-find heirlooms, and priceless antiques. The Internet is your deep-sea vessel, sonar, and oxygen tank all in one.

Reach beyond your neighborhood. Search through inventory of a vendor from your home town, or if you don't find what you're looking for there, try that fellow in California, Texas or Canada for that matter.

If you want to sell your own products online, you will need to choose a means for your customers to pay you. Otherwise, you won't be in business very long! If you have regular office hours and employees, or want to hire a service, you can offer to let your customers phone in their orders and/or credit card number.

But most marketers want total automation of their ordering and payment process. They understand that without automation, they can't have time freedom that Internet marketing lifestyle can bring. And many of today's Internet shoppers are used to ordering online, without having to phone anyone. They expect to be able to add their items to a shopping cart, then complete checkout process smoothly. If you don't offer that to them, they may choose to shop at another site that does.

For automated payment systems, there are just two basic choices. You can either get your own merchant account and do all payment processing from your site, or you can choose a third-party processing service. It really is that simple - everything else is detail. Of course, devil's in details, so let's take a look at each.

For high volume or high dollar sales, having a merchant account is almost always best option. There's a certain break even cost point where it makes sense to pay monthly fees and processing charges of a standard merchant account. Not so long ago, it was difficult for online merchants to even get an account, because of extra risk associated with Internet payment processing. And when you could find a bank willing to offer you an Internet merchant account, monthly fees were much higher than for standard accounts, enough to make them out of financial reach of many small businesses.