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Articles / A Paypal Primer
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A Paypal Primer |
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To conduct business on the Internet, whether informal, one-time only
transactions between two friends, or a full-fledged business selling
products or services, payment arrangements have to be made. Before
1998, this often meant either checks sent through snail-mail, or very
expensive, and often hard-to-obtain, merchant accounts for online
credit card processing. In 1998, PayPal was introduced to fill the
payment processing gap.
PayPal now has about 50 million members, but was originally introduced
to provide a payment processing service for online auction buyers and
sellers, in particular, eBay. Since then, PayPal has grown into the
premier third-party payment processing service. In fact, PayPal was so
successful that eBay bought the company in 2002, replacing their own
Billpoint service with the far superior PayPal service.
PayPal is free to join, although buyers are no longer required to join
in order to pay for goods and services from seller members. Many people
are still afraid to do business online, and won't provide their credit
card information. Scams certainly abound in cyberspace, but PayPal is a
solid, reputable company, and there is little to fear.
For sellers, PayPal offers much lower processing fees than many other
third-party processors. PayPal rates are not much higher than those of
merchant account processors, and there are no ongoing fees. You only
pay PayPal fees when you make a sale. It is also much easier and faster
to set up a PayPal account than a merchant account. Some sellers
complain of unjustly frozen PayPal accounts, and as with most any
service, there are plenty of horror stories surrounding other PayPal
actions. However, many more buyers and sellers have used PayPal from
the beginning with no problem at all.
PayPal offers transfer of funds to and from a PayPal account through
e-checks, debit and credit cards, and instant transfer from other
members' accounts. They offer debit cards to allow you to make
purchases against your account balance, just as you would with a bank
debit card, a money-market interest rate on the balances in some
accounts, seller and buyer protection services, invoicing, recurring
billing, shopping cart, and many other tools that online merchants may
need.
By Jakob Jelling
http://www.sitetube.com
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