I’m in the process of investigating how I could process payments through the website.  I want to make it a quick process for a new restaurant to sign up and be operational on the site.  Of course, I also want to make the participation with my site a low risk.  How payments are processed is a major component to the risk that a company is going to see with signing up.

I figure there are two main methods to payment processing that I can go with.  First is to open a merchant account and receive all payments in my own account.  Then I could turn around and settle the accounts with the restaurants on a 2 or 4 week schedule.  Second is to offer an eBay type of environment where the restaurant can sign up with their own payment processor and I’ll simply host their payment method on my site. 

Either way requires restaurants to even want to sign up.  Hmm.  I need to get it done so that I finish this big experiment.  Let’s say this, if this ends up flopping, I’ll make the mapping feature more visible so that you can see the boundary lines for any restaurant.  That was the original idea anyway.