It itsnt amaturish to accept or use Paypal in the web development world. For me it is convienent and east to use especially the debit card. And I do display the paypal logo. I do have a stormpay account but I do not use it that often. I had only set it up to accomodate those who are in countries who can not sign up or use paypal. You can add the stormpay and egold logos to your websites to let people know what their options are.
Accepting only paypal does look amature to me. If compared to website, you're like "IE only" type. Yes, designing "IE only" site or accepting only Paypal is super convenient to you and majority of IE users, but it's very frustrating for non-IE users. If you want worldwide exposure, processing credit card is what you need. It's de facto standard. Accepting both cc and paypal is even better! (PayPal accepts credit cards from very few countries)
Don't think it's free, as they needed to serve time later on. Maybe right though on doing community services for free.
lots of countries can pay credit card through paypal, but i also accept e-gold, western union, stormpay etc.
Even if it did look amateurish, not having Paypal could lose you sales. I always prefer paying through Paypal, and would sometimes just not buy from a site if they only accepted cards.
I use PayPal and a traditional Merchant Account to cover my bases. The more options you have and can afford the better.
i run a couple of membership sites as well as a couple of physical product sites - here is my experience. to non-technical users: paypal is like wtf?! when presented with the option (even stating no account required) they generally go away thinking i dont have a paypal in my wallet. remember most people are still very frigtened about giving credit card details online. if you have never used ebay or come across paypal before it does not pose as a legitimate option to some people. in fact the whole paypal account process has been complained about to my customer service as if we process or handle the payments side ourselves. merchant accounts: since installing a merchant account abandoned carts have dropped by 50% and sales have gone up by 50%. yes we pay a slightly higher rate almost double our paypal account rate of 2.4% but its more than made up for in increased sales. relating to chargebacks: we havent had any chargebacks since converting to a merchant account, whereas we always got a few complaints via paypals internal complaints system (which is far too verbose for my liking). on the rare occasion we suffered a chargeback via paypal, we were unable to deal with the credit card company directly. with my merchant services, i have been led to believe that i will have a greater ability to dispute a chargeback. in summary: if you operatre in a tech-centric market, where you know your clients are computer literate, have probably dabbled with ebay and done a lot of surfing and online purchasing i would say you could get away with paypal only. for any other market i would look into a merchant service as default payment processer and offer paypal as a secondary. that way you have covered all bases as 'smallbizstartupkit' suggests.
Many larger companies are beginning to use PayPal now such as Barnes and Nobles, Dell, Buy.com 1-800 Flowers, Sharper Images - so its gaining popularity as a mainstream merchant account. If you need to use paypal and want a more professional merchant account, then you can always go with Website Payment Pro - that way customers can pay on your website.