I’m a big track and field fan, so you know what part of the Summer Olympics I’ve been watching. As the owner of an online business I enjoy watching the competition, because it reminds me of what I face every day competing in the virtual shopping mall.

One of my favorite events is the hurdles because I enjoy watching the precision movements of the athletes. They almost seems like their moves are choreographed and they also remind me of what I face daily, and how I have to make sure I’m doing everything I can to overcome what the competition, the market and the economy put in my way.

However, I also notice one thing a hurdler does not do is place extra hurdles in their path, which is more than I can say for many of my peers in the e-retailing field. They make decisions that make doing business unnecessarily hard. For example let’s look at credit card processing.

Probably the biggest hurdle any online business owner can put down is not getting set up to accept payments online. With billions being spent annually by online shoppers every year, and 80 percent of everything bought online being paid for with a credit card, it is the height of folly not to have an ecommerce merchant account capability.

However, simply being able to process credit cards does not make any business person’s path automatically smooth. Choosing the right merchant services company also needs to be done thoughtfully and carefully to avoid taking a tumble.

Possibly the second-largest hurdle that is self inflicted is choosing from among the so-called discount providers. They will brag about their low rates but they don’t talk about their seemingly endless list of fees just to establish service (hurdle), the impossible-to-qualify parameters to get their discount (hurdle) and the others fees buried in the fine print they never mention (hurdle).

The smart way to go is to consider some of the established players in the credit card services business. One way to identify those companies is by their lack of upfront fees and their short approval cycle. The best, for example, do not charge an application fee (a savings of around $300) and can make a decision within approximately 24 hours. They can also usually have you set to process your first transactions in that same amount of time upon approval.

But before you apply, take a look at your business. Someone who sells expensive Victorian antiques can probably do quite well if they make 3-4 sales in a week. A department store wouldn’t last a month on that volume of sales. So if your site is more like the former you can handle a higher per transaction fee, while the latter would need a lower fee so they didn’t liquidate their profit margins.

And the final hurdle you want to avoid is not being perceived as trustworthy, and this is again a place where dealing with a top-flight provider is going to make a difference. They will be able to provide a secure virtual terminal (an Internet-based portal used for processing card transactions) and a safe payment gateway an e-commerce application that authorizes payments for e-businesses

The bottom line here is to not give any customer than comes to your site any reason to take their business somewhere else. And if you have shoddy credit card processing, or no merchant account services, that’s exactly what will happen.