Pay Pal Merchant Account
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David
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February 20th, 2012
Pay Pal merchant accounts allow you to accept credit cards as soon as you setup your website. You can visit Pay Pal to setup a free account and begin accepting payments as soon as your website is online.
You'll need to go through a verification process such as adding a credit card to your account or verifying a couple of small deposits to the bank account that you list on the account. You'll also need to verify your email address and physical address. It may seem tedious but it's extremely important to keep scammers from taking advantage of the Pay Pal system.
The Benefits Of Pay Pal
You'll find that there are quite a few benefits to using Pay Pal. As I mentioned there isn't a setup fee associated with Pay Pal so there is no upfront costs involved. Plus there is the name recognition, people trust Pay Pal so they know that if they have an issue with an order that they have a reliable source to dispute their charges with.
Another benefit is the quick process in which you can accept payments. I mentioned a few things that you need to verify before using Pay Pal but those are for some of the advanced features like removing withdrawal limits, showing visitors that you've been verified by Pay Pal and actually accepting credit cards.
Aside from the features that I listed, you can start accepting Pay Pal in a matter of 30 minutes or so if everything you enter is legitimate. This all goes on while your completing your verification process.
Fees Associated With Pay Pal
A great feature that will benefit you for accepting Pay Pal initially is the fact that they don't charge a setup fee or a monthly charge. This is a great feature because it's likely that as you start your first website you sales will be limited. Other credit card merchants will charge you a monthly fee whether you sell anything or not.
The per-transaction fees will vary depending on the package that you choose. These prices are subject to change but as of 3/3/08 they are current. The fees associated with the standard Pay Pal merchant account are $0.30 per transaction plus 1.9% - 2.9% of the selling price.
These fees are common when you accept credit cards online. Actually they are very reasonable considering that they don't have a monthly fee.
Integrate Pay Pal Into Your Website
Another great feature of Pay Pal is that it's easy to integrate into your website. If you're using an shopping cart, most of them have integrated Pay Pal directly into the shopping cart. All you need to do is simply enter your Pay Pal email address.
Even if you're using a website that doesn't have a shopping cart you can sell products using Pay Pal. You can create buttons so that when someone clicks on the button, the visitor is directed to the Pay Pal website to complete the payment and once it's completed the visitor is directed back to your website.
It's possible that you've seen the button, they are similar to the buttons below:
Preferred Method Of eBay
If you intend on selling on eBay you'll definitely want to setup a Pay Pal account. Pay Pal is owned by eBay and is the preferred payment method of most buyers online.
The nice thing is that Pay Pal is nicely integrated into eBay so if you sell a product on eBay you can easily accept a payment without needing any sort of merchant account.
According to Pay Pal, they have over 164,000,000 user accounts worldwide so it's necessary to setup a Pay Pal account so that you're not losing out on the potential to sell to those millions of users.
Alternatives To Pay Pal
Although Pay Pal is the preferred method of payment to so many people there are alternatives that should be recognized. A few reasons that you'd look for an alternative to Pay Pal is that your shopping cart doesn't accept it, you'd like to research better fees or you'd simply like to add other payment options to your website.
Read more on alternatives to Pay Pal.
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