Visa has implemented new rules on handling credit cards. Unless you want your server and all your code to be subject to an audit by the credit card companies, you do not want to store any credit card info on your server.
There are two main ways you can use a payment gateway like ECHO.
The first way is that you can send the visitor to a secure form that is hosted on ECHO's servers that will take all the payment information and give a response back to your server on whether or not the transaction was successful. This method makes it easier on you in terms of offering a secure payment system for your customers since all the credit card security is handled by the payment gateway.
The second way is that the gateway offers you a program that you can send data to, which responds with the approval or denial code and a response message. It's fairly easy to set this up with ECHO. They even offer sample code that will help you build the form and the form data processing code. This puts a lot of the burden on you and your system. You will have to make sure that you are not storing any of the purchaser's credit card information and provide a SSL connection for the form so that the data transmission is secure.