PayPal

Paypal is a long established company that was recently acquired by Ebay, the online auction company.

It provides individuals and businesses with a highly efficient and extremely secure payment mechanism, but in order to use it to make or receive payments, you have to set up an account with them.

This takes a little time, because part of the process involves authenticating your account by having Paypal take two small credits from your bank or credit card account. You then have to go online and enter the two amounts as a security key.

Once done of course, there's no problem, but if you are selling an item to somebody without an existing Paypal account, what do you think the chances are that they will revisit your site in a week or two to complete their purchase?

On a positive note, there are millions of people in the UK, Europe and the USA that do have Paypal accounts and so it's easy for them to pay you!

On our sites, we tend to use and recommend Paypal as a secondary processor, as to do otherwise would seriously limit our sales numbers.

Integration of Paypal into your web site is very simple and only requires a line or two of pre-generated code including on your web pages.

If you offer a service whereby you need to rebill every month, quarter or year, this is easily achieved with Paypal subscriptions. Again, Paypal generates the code and you just include it in your web pages.

The only difficulty with the service at the moment is that Paypal have decided against processing for certain types of business. This includes adult oriented content sites and a whole list of other businesses too. Check their ever-expanding terms of service for up to date details.

Unlike other third party payment systems, Paypal doesn't send you your money until you request it.

Instead, you log into your Paypal account and withdraw your money into your designated bank account. This takes about 7 days for UK customers.

Paypal is also useful for making payments and once you have an account of your own, you'll see how easy and convenient it is to make payments to other companies and individuals.

Even if you don't intend to use Paypal to collect customer payments, we still recommend that you open a Paypal acount - it's free whether you are buying or selling. You only pay to withdraw money.