1. Hire one provider, an expert, to handle everything for you - the merchant account, your billing logic (ex. recurring billing) and the payment gateway.
2. Get the best in breed for each layer in the stack. The Chargify/Recurly/Cheddargetter set is working to be the best in class at handling billing logic. For most online services the billing logic is quite complicated (and gets increasingly complicated over time) and something that the majority of merchant account providers / gateways are not historically good at handling.
1. Hire one provider, an expert, to handle everything for you - the merchant account, your billing logic (ex. recurring billing) and the payment gateway.
2. Get the best in breed for each layer in the stack. The Chargify/Recurly/Cheddargetter set is working to be the best in class at handling billing logic. For most online services the billing logic is quite complicated (and gets increasingly complicated over time) and something that the majority of merchant account providers / gateways are not historically good at handling.