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You should acclimate by putting it in a bucket with the water it came in, and using airline tubing to drip water from your tank. Tie a loose knot in the tubing and you can tighten it to adjust the flow. It should only be a few drips per second, not a steady flow, but not a single drip every few seconds.
Dwarfs generally only live 6-8 months, total lifespan, so buying one you might have it for a few months but most likely only 5 or 6 at most. From my own experience as well as others the O. mercatoris' don't tend to try and escape tanks but I would take precautions as you just never can know for sure. One plus is that their eggs are large and you can raise the offspring, provided lots of tiny food, like live mysid shrimp and small blue leg hermits.
Some people have successfully kept multiple O. mercatoris' in one tank together, as well as bred them, so you could potentially perpetuate a cycle of generation after generation. Of course eventually you are going to see the effects of inbreeding, but it has been observed that inbreeding doesn't have any adverse effects in cephalopods until many generations later, after continued inbreeding. This could be fixed by introducing new wild caught octos or octos bred by someone else.
In the long term this kind of project could result in octos that are more adapt to aquarium life and more likely to switch their nocturnal, shy behavior into more interactive, and even possibly diurnal behavior. My theory on that is that captive bred clownfish tend to lose their instinct to have a symbiotic relationship with an anemone, so it's possible the octopus offspring would lose their tendancy to hide from its owner after being raised in captivity. Other octos learn from each other... so the response could be passed on octo to octo pretty easily. Again, just a theory.
My O. mercatoris was relatively boring. He only came out late at night, and I could only observe it under a red light. I had him for 4 months. He ate fiddler crabs every few days. It was very entertaining to watch him conquer crabs his own size, very impressive. But most of the time he was hiding in a large snail shell.
Check out TONMO.com as already mentioned.
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