Im a big fan of PayPal. Actually been using them for a very long time. I actually prefer to use them for transactions over the net. In fact all to often if someone or a web store/seller is not offering it as a payment method I will move on.
More and more sellers are dropping paypal, I can speak from personal experience on this one. Having worked with them from the seller side for over 10 years (saying something given how young PP is as a company) I don't know what is going on over there, but I had to drop them. The paypal being the safest way to pay thing is a lie, laws in the US mean credit cards are WAY safer and surer ways to get your money back from paypal. You file a paypal dispute, if paypal rules in your favor and if the person hasn't emptied their paypal account (or lost enough other disputes to have no money left) you'll probably get your money back. You file a credit card chargeback, you're getting your money back with almost absolute certainty. Just something to be aware of.
As far as why sellers are dropping paypal, there are two primary reasons in my view. The first is that paypal came along at a time when you couldn't easily get a credit card processor as a small vendor. This is now far from the case, and these CC processors give better rates and services than paypal. The preference for better rates is obvious, but services like being able to block accounts which you know are fraudulent or problematic from making payments, getting real time fraud-risk assessments on payments, and managing your own fraud risk rules/tools to stop scammers are all HUGE advantages which paypal just doesn't have. The second reason why I stopped working with paypal is that there is something catastrophically wrong over there. They messed up multiple tax forms in MAJOR ways (including sending tax documents to the wrong state), and after a month and multiple emails they just sent me a useless form letter response. Multiple phone calls with long wait times on hold were required. And once you get a person on the phone, they have to apologize profusely because their databases take minutes to load which wastes everyones time. There was also an instance of fraud on an account (okay these things happen) and paypal smartly locked out the account.... the problem was getting it unlocked. The requested information to secure the account was provided immediately, and their system said they'd get back to us in two days. The problem with locking out an account is that, as a seller, the account still accepts payments but now you can't do business with the account meaning transfer money out or more importantly refund payments. (as a seller, just part of doing business is some percentage of orders will be messed up, canceled, etc and you MUST be able to send prompt refunds otherwise people become really really upset and rightly so) Again it took them over a month and multiple emails and a long time on hold on the phone to get everything sorted out.
Because I absolutely flat out refuse to screw my customers like that, I just can't serve them on the timeline of months things need to be done in hours or a day or two worst case, I had to stop accepting paypal. Talking with a few of my other friends who do a lot of business with paypal, they're having similar issues. *shrug* I don't mean to go on an anti-paypal tirade here, just have some sympathy for vendors who simply won't put up with it anymore and have moved on to better options. You're exceptionally well protected via credit card, much more so than with paypal, and so if a vendor has or is exclusive with that as a payment option you can feel very safe using it.