Sometimes I run into trouble with only offering paypal. Like yesterday for instance. This guy wants to make a purchase from my site and emails me and says he has a debit card but no paypal or other payment accounts and he lives in egypt. So how do I accept his payment without the hassle of creating memberships on all of those other gateways and having to go through all of the hassle? Should I just install a script on the website that will accept these credit card? I know paypal will let non members use a credit card but apparently only US residents. Any ideas? Thanks in advance.

You may want a merchant account or a similar solution. Check out Authorize.net. 2CheckOut is another great option.
Be careful with international orders - they can sometimes be fraudulent. Good luck!
-mike

Thanks Mike. I'm very standoffish when it comes to orders from foreign countries. I got burned before by folks from Nigeria. Thats why I only use firefox as my browser now. Keeps all of the leaches from stealing my passwords etc.

You don't have to be a paypal member to use paypal. You can use it like a merchant account. When the paypal page comes up, off to the bottom left there is a link if you're not a member and you don't have to sign up.
Otherwise, you'll have to go with some type of merchant account or with a 3rd party merchant.

Be wary of accepting PayPal payments from non-verified PayPal members as you are taking an extended risk since they are not verified. As far as most merchant accounts international payments offer no real fraud protection PayPal might look at this the same way. If the customer decides to chargeback the purchase to PayPal, PayPal may charge it right back to you since the transaction wouldn't of been verified.

A professional looking business should offer many more options than paypal.

A professional looking business should offer many more options than paypal.
Exactly. PayPal ONLY reeks of low budget. No offense intended.

I am mainly just trying to avoid having so many different accounts with the different payment gateways. Is there a way to link a universal payment processor to my website so that everyone with a credit card or a bank account can buy?

There are services such as Authorize.net or MerchantPlus that will proxy your transaction to basically all credit card gateways for a small fee (like %1 of the transaction, or $0.30). They generally all provide example code to get you on your way. But please be aware that once you are storing and processing credit card information, you should have more than basic security skills, site wide.
The worst thing you can do to your customers, is expose their payment information to google or others :(
PayPal is always nice because you do not hold any of the standard security risk of a financial transaction... assuming that you trust PayPal.
With that being said, integration with theses services is quite simple and the almost always provide a simple HTTPS POST API.

Thanks for the reply. I really like the ease of use of PayPal and have never had trouble with them at all. But some folks don't have or don't want a paypal account so I am forced to find a way to make it easy to do business with them. Im gonna look into your suggestions. Thanks! :)

If you do select a merchant provider with authorize.net you don't have to store cc information. That would require you to be PCI compliant and it's a whole other realm. We use whmcs & authorize.net, card information isn't stored on our servers. You might be interested in looking at Worldpay and google checkout. A merchant account as a whole will get you far better rates (most of the time) then these other alternatives since the more you process the more your merchant provider will want your business.

Many users are confused by PayPal & Google Checkout so the acceptance of credit cards directly is important

Many users are confused by PayPal & Google Checkout so the acceptance of credit cards directly is important
I agree with you, i use 2checkout.com and it's really awesome, try it it's cheap cost and one-time setup fee.

You always want to offer backup payment solutions, for just the scenarios you have come across. If you want to stick with paypal, hey, that's fine, but then you should expect to lose business.
If you're just starting out, then you probably don't need (or can't justify) a second processor, but if you're not, then it's time to consider that option.

Yes definitely consider more than one payment option like credit cards are really good or google checkout or something...

Yah, paypal is well know, millions of user and millions of dollars that are in paypal just waiting in peoples account to burn on your site. So you are gonna miss out on this disposable income if you don't use them, however they are not a bank. That means they can cut you off at anytime, keep all the money and freeze your account without notice. To avoid this common dilemma with them you should always use a 2nd processor preferable one that is working with a good bank and has to follow the laws of the land. Paypal is lawless and can do whatever they want but use them while you can, you will make more money off them than any other merchant processor on the market.

I agree with you Rollguy. I have heard of some troubling experiences other webmasters have had in the past who run ecommerce sites using paypal and they lost a lot of money. Of course I believe that there should be a set of rules put into place to mandate paypal but until then I won't let my account accumulate over $100.00 at a time before I make a deposit into my bank account to avoid losing anything if they decide to screw me over.