paypal's fine
however its not the panacea
dispute resolution can be a problem
not all people have paypal accounts. however if you believe your target market is likely to have a paypal account then paypal only is a sensible option

going to a third party setup works OK, but if you value your sanity don't use Sagepay, in my experience they are unhelpful, ignorant arrogant and useless. classic symptoms are heres a change that you must make to your site, but you have got 14 days to do it, event though we (sagepay) have known for the last 6 months this fix needs applying. when it works it works well. however depending on volume of transactions it may be expensive

I doubt you will be able to roll your own solution these days, the banks (at least those in the UK) are of the belief that rolling your own solution is a serious issue (subtext they and their associates like sagepay) can't gouge enough money from you if you do your own solution.

I've re-opened the thread. It is either locked and dormant, or open and active. It shouldn't be locked and active to moderators.

Happy for it to be locked though - it has become a bit of a SPAM magnet.

pootle flump ur codings are working excelent.

We've used paypal in a site before and you need to be careful of the amounts of money involved in the transaction. You'll need to get yourself verified first which takes a couple of days. If you reach a certain amount of money into your account then paypal can suspend your account which isn't good. There are also limits on the amount per transaction so if you're selling items for more then a few hundred dollars then I'd advise against using paypal. It gets suspicious very easily too. Finally, last caveat. Paypal isn't accepted in some countries so if you think you'll be shipping to some obscure countries then I'd forget it.

I also prefer the Paypal button - it's more than adequate to meet the needs of the "average joe"

I'm ultimately a fan of both. Maintain your own cart and hand it off to PayPal for the actual transaction, then listen for an IPN when it's all over. I find this approach to offer the best flexibility with the least amount of liability and overhead. Now days a lot of the freebie carts have the basic hand-off-to-paypal-and-wait-for-a-response built in too, so that doesn't hurt.