PayPal is
great, but only if your transaction levels are pretty stable. If you're kind of up and down within a small interval, okay, but if your income swings wildly, their anti-fraud mechanism can be pretty severe.
I've used PayPal for many years with no trouble at all. (That includes a period after my stroke a few years back when a large number of my fellow developers paid in a great deal of money—without being asked—to help with expenses. That was a huge jump over my regular sales, but it didn't trigger a lockout. The IBM Lotus software community is a great bunch of people. Just sayin'.) It's certainly convenient for customers, and it's a name they'll know and trust.
The automated anti-fraud measures are usually more of a problem for "startups" than for small or home businesses, since the object of the game with a startup is to go from zero to rich in a relative hurry (if things work out, of course). A sudden large jump in transactions can lock your account, leaving you with frozen assets and with no way for customers to pay. Again, that will only happen if you do something that's going to grow rapidly, and it's there to protect the customer from (potentially) fraudulent action on your part.
If you
are planning to grow quickly, you might find
Stripe to be a better alternative. They're not available world-wide yet, and they're not nearly as familiar a name to your customers as PayPal, but they are structured around startups (being one themselves) and let you grow much more quickly. They will manually review accounts before locking (if necessary) if the system sees erratic or fast-rising patterns.
