Use Paypal to Accept Credit Card Payment Online
Accepting
credit card payment online such as Visa and MasterCard is
essential to Internet business. Usually, internet merchant
requires to apply for a merchant account before they can accept
online credit card payment. However, as a small business or
home business owner, the fee incurred may not be affordable.
PayPal will be a very good alternative to help you accept
online credit card payment.
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.
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Jakob Jelling is the founder of http://www.sitetube.com.
Visit his website for the latest on planning, building, promoting
and maintaining websites.
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