Keep in mind that unhappy customers tend to write angry reviews, and happy customers don’t write anything. Credit card fraud is a big problem. Lots of web sites are shady, borderline illegal, not PCI compliant, and the owners are not familiar with credit card processing procedures like chargebacks and holds. Thus some of the bad reviews, which are really saying “I didn’t understand how this works before I signed up.”

I have worked on and managed a lot of e-commerce sites. If you can open a merchant account with a bank (which is not necessarily easy) you can use any number of processors. Braintree is the one several of my clients use. PayPal owns Braintree but it works separately from PayPal’s credit card offerings.

If you don’t have a merchant bank account you have to use an intermediary like Stripe or PayPal. They use their own merchant account and charge higher fees. I’ve used both and find them about the same, though I think Stripe integration with a web site is a bit simpler. Most of my clients use Stripe and none of them has had serious issues. When I’ve had support issues I got them resolved quickly, though it seems like PayPal has more bureaucracy.