Thanks. I went ahead and researched PayPal some more and it looks like you only need a merchant account if you earn/sell more than $3000.00 a month, which I'm sure I wont, and so it's just the basic 2.9% up to $3K fee with no other fees at all. They have a 'website payment standard' program that lets you add their button to your website to collect the monies, so that should work. I will have to tweak it a bit though, as usually most people give me the card number over the phone and the prices change based upon what they want, so I have to investigate that further as well. (selling website hosting / developing services, not hard products per say, so the price varies)
I was planning on using the basic "personal 'request money' link", but I think the buyer has to have a paypal account, or sign up for one, at the time of purchase and some people don't want to do that.
Am I reading that right?
Once again, thanks for the direction.
here is the link for the compare between web payment standard and pro, in which you need the merchant account.
https://merchant.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/?&cmd=_render-content&content_ID=merchant/demo_standard_vs_pro