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We went through this recently and decided that Braintree was a nice one stop shop. Great hand holding through the set up process and lots of api/library support out there. You can always decide to put Chargify on top of that if you want. Bonus -- if you end up getting a merchant account with your existing bank you can swap that in later. (Though you probably will get a better rate w/ Braintree).
Basically, your payment form posts to SpreedlyCore, which posts back to your server with a token. Your app can then perform the basic payment actions, including validation of the user's posted payment data (minus the sensitive info, of course).
The service supports several gateways, and you never see the customer's payment details. The API simplifies dealing with responses. The biggest pain is that it's XML-based.
Regardless, I got it up and working in about a day, and I am slow. :)
It's very easy to use, and though new, the team is very responsive, and the API follows most conventions of their Spreedly subscription service, which is more mature.
The only thing you need to bring is an SSL cert, but you were gonna do that anyway. :)
Paypal is great to get started but my experience is that you'll take a hit to your cashflow at some stage. They'll freeze your account, chew up a lot of your time and make you angry. That's part of the cost of doing business with Paypal, so if you need cashflow, accountability and legal protections then go with a bank.
In the early stages, don't be afraid to do a chunk of your billing work manually (producing invoices, providing refunds, calculating pro-rated charges etc). This will give you important insight into customer pain-points and you'll learn a lot about online payments too.
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Authorize.net also offers a hosted option so that the merchant doesn't have to deal with the burden of PCI compliance. In other words, the merchant (you) never sees the credit card number. http://developer.authorize.net/api/sim/
Authorize.net's AIM gateway also allows the flexibility to authorize now and capture later - without the webapp needing to store the credit card info. Pretty nice if you want to do things like "we'll bill your credit card only when item ships", etc.
If you want something simple without writing much code, go with PayPal. You'd expect some "horror stories" from a payment processor with 232 million accounts. Virtually all of them involve someone doing something that'd raise flags at any merchant account provider or bank, it's just that people think PayPal isn't a bank so they should be able to get away with anything. 10,000 horror stories still leaves 99.99% of use…
Authorize.net also offers a hosted option so that the merchant doesn't have to deal with the burden of PCI compliance. In other words, the merchant (you) never sees the credit card number. http://developer.authorize.net/api/sim/
Are any of the solutions out there comparable to BrainTree? It's easy to process CC's, even recurring, but it's a pain to do PCI compliance. If the CC info hits your server, you're in PCI scope. BrainTree has the browser send the info direct to them, then redirects with a token you can use to check information and perform charges. Anything else out there like that? That is, all the flexibility of being able to run ch…
google "square".