I let my customers chose between PayPal Subscriptions and 2Checkout.
Both work okay, but I would absolutely prefer a method that didn't involve redirecting my customers to unknown domains and interfaces like Paypal.com and 2Checkout.com.
It's a bit of a stretch to call them "unknown domains" in 2011. PayPal has 232 million accounts in over 190 markets, and anyone that's ever bought something on eBay knows them. People on all my websites have a choice between using a credit card right on the site or checking out through PayPal, and on every one of those sites, they choose PayPal more than 50% of the time.
If you are talking about the US market, you are right. In the Norwegian market, the one I'm operating it, it is certainly not that way. Very few ordinary "non-geeky" people have heard about Paypal here.
Another problem with Paypal.com and 2Checkout.com is the amount of data they require to charge my card. There's no way they need to know my home address, phone number, email address, etc. I feel sorry for those who will post PII to some sub-merchant website because the seller's devs were too lazy to write something user and privacy -friendly.
It's not about laziness, it's about fraud. The less you know about your customer the more likely the person on the other end is not who they claim to be, and doesn't have permission to use the credit card they're using. For some sites that's fine, for others taking only a CC#, CVV2 code and zip code (the minimum necessary info to pay a decent transaction rate ) and you'll be out of business in a few months from the chargeback rate.
Once you lose a merchant account for CB rate (consistently above 1%), you'll never get another again, since all banks/MSPs check the TMF and MATCH file and will see you've been terminated in the past. Both your business information and the social security numbers of all principals of the business will be blacklisted for life.
You might be interested in the book "Founders at Work: Stories of Startups Early Days". PayPal is one of the founding stories covered. The only reason PayPal is here, where so many other payment services came and went during the dot-com boom, is that they tackled the fraud problem. There were times when PayPal was bleeding over $10 million a month to fraudulent activity. They are, in effect, the largest payment fraud management company in the world.
Both work okay, but I would absolutely prefer a method that didn't involve redirecting my customers to unknown domains and interfaces like Paypal.com and 2Checkout.com.