what is the best way of having credit card payments on your website for people to purchase something without them having to have a paypal account?

please help me out, thanks.

Without pointing out the obvious, PayPal does in fact allow users to make payments without a PP account using a card!

is using paypal the best way, and the cheapest way of doing it?

Most probably not. They charge a whopping 3.9% for all transactions, and it's not exactly easy to get discounts. Try worldpay.

Nochex have slightly better rates than PayPal...

I use www.propay.com

Haven't had a lick of trouble and also use www.mals-e.com to collect secure info from my customers.

Matthew

What, nobody uses real merchant accounts anymore?

If your serious about accepting credit cards, you need a merchant account and payment gateway. Take a look at www.payquake.com

Another good merchant account / gateway to use is bluepay.com

Authorize.net is the most popular gateway, visit their site for merchant accounts that use them.