We're implementing online payments for a subscription service used about equally by American and European clients.
We've already decided, for this first iteration, that we'd prefer not to get a merchant account, and that it's acceptable to bill in USD. (I know this isn't an ideal solution for Europeans.)
I would prefer to use a service like Stripe, where we don't have to store credit card data but the payment itself feels 'native' - it seems to take place entirely on our own site.
However, the European developers I work with tell me something like PayPal would be preferable, because the payment forms are not on our site - instead, the user is redirected to a third-party service they're more likely to trust. They tell me that apart from a few large services, this is the way it's done in Europe.
This fascinates me, because in my head, redirecting to a third-party site for payment feels amateurish. But this may just be my preferences as a Canadian who's only worked in the United States, and lacks extensive experience dealing with Europeans.
So, my question, primarily for the Europeans: taking both European attitudes towards security and European attitudes towards aesthetics into account, do you think European small businesses would prefer to pay for a service on that service's website or on the website of a third-party service like PayPal?
But if you feel this is amateurish, try your best that it does not look that way. Integrate as much as possible or do an iframe or whatever (I don't know if this is possible security wise). But like I said, people in the Netherlands (and by the way this also counts for the Belgiums who live in the Dutch speaking part of Belgium called Vlaanderen) are used to redirects to 3rd party site. I do not know how the other European countries do this.
Also don't forget to offer pages in all different European languages, because not everyone speaks business English that well.