Is there a cheap way to get money from customers (Not PayPal etc)
mhp: 3% is as low as you can get with Amex.  2% is as low as you can get with Visa/MC.  The only other thing consumers can pay you with is an ACH transfer (which is like a check) and even that costs money for both ends sometimes -- but the systems that let you write "electronic checks" are clunky and weird and 90% of your customers will want to use their credit card for fear of giving you their bank account numbers.  That puts you back at 2-4%.  So you're definitely on the high end, but you're going to save max about 1%.  Is 1% of your revenue worth the cost of setting up your own merchant account (it will be a few weeks of work if you run your own payment system).  If you use an off the shelf shopping cart system, go with authorize.net and it should work out of the box.