"Just add Stripe" is the default advice for a solo dev who needs to charge money. It works right up until you're an Indian merchant trying to sell to a buyer in San Francisco and a buyer in Bangalore in the same afternoon — at which point you discover that a single provider can't actually do both, and the fix rearranges more of your code than you'd expect.
I hit this building Skill Exchange (a marketplace for reusable AI skills — link at the end). The marketplace itself isn't the point here; it's the harness I used to figure out how to take money from two people on opposite sides of the world without a US entity and without Stripe. These are the things I'd tell another dev before they start.
PayPal in India is cross-border only — so it can't serve your Indian buyers at all
The first assumption to kill: PayPal is not a domestic payment method in India. PayPal shut down India-to-India domestic payments in April 2021. What's left works only cross-border — an Indian merchant can receive money from abroad, but a rupee-holding buyer in India cannot pay an India-based merchant through it.
I learned this the way you'd expect: I wired up PayPal, tested it with my own (Indian) account against my own (Indian) merchant account, and got a cheerful, useless "Things don't appear to be working at the moment." No error code, no docs entry — the transaction is simply classified as domestic and refused. It works flawlessly the moment the buyer is international, which is exactly what makes the failure so confusing when you're testing from your own country.
