[gkn]

I was in the same boat as you. If you want a globally available service that IS developer friendly, reliable and simple, PayPal might actually be the correct answer after all. It is what we ended up with after a lot of research.

I don't know your reasons for not wanting to use PayPal, they might differ from my hesitations, but after spending a couple of days experimenting, reading docs and so forth, I found the technical side of it extraordinaraily flexible and easy to use.