We´re planning on a website for selling hardware from europe to states, and haven´t got that much experience with the actual construction of the webstore. We have design and database experience, so the programming isn´t really that much of an issue.

Is the PayPal Website Payments Standard a good alternative? It seems simple to implement into any page, and we are going to use PayPal to start with anyway. They also have a credit card option in their service.

On the other hand you can do more stuff with the zencart, and I also have an uneasy feeling about getting tied to PayPal only, for some reason. Any advice?

Zencart will let you expand more in the future, and you could still start with only accepting Paypal through Zencart's shopping cart. Very easy to set up also. Then when you want to add credit card payments or anything else, just add the module to Zencart and you're golden.

I for one wont even consider using paypal as my payment processor. I personally like 2checkout as a 3rd party processor and if you are looking for a real merchant you should try authorize.net . And another viable option for you web store is Oscommerce which supports both payment gateways.
Regards

I know a lot of people despise Paypal, myself sometiems included, but I think not offering it as a payment method because of its profileration is not necessarily the smartest thing, especially if you're targeting a consumer market that, for the msot part, has Paypal accounts. Many people have extra money in their Paypal account that they could be spending on you, where as they may not be willing to use a credit card. That being said, I think that having a dedicated credit card gateway in addition to Paypal is also a smart move when the budget allows for it.

Paypal is a great 3rd party credit card processor, we used that ourselves. But if you use their shopping cart straightoff, I think you can only accept Paypal payments. If you wanna accept others like 2checkout, egold,etc then you gotta use some 3rd party carts or custom carts.

Ofcourse is good to have paypal as an extra method of payment for marketing porpuses but relying solely on that i dont find it such a briliant ideea.

Thank you for you answers, I´ll go for Zencart.