PayPal Merchanting – More Options

For any online retailer, PayPal offers a variety of options to make selling your products or services easy as setting up an account. Particularly for small business operations, setting up a merchant account to accept credit card payments can be cost prohibitive. PayPal offers everything needed to start selling online immediately with no upfront cost and according to the company, 43% of online consumers have used their payment services at least once.

There are two options for a small business merchant account at PayPal: Website Payments Standard or Website Payments Pro. Which one is best for your online business will depend on your sales volume and the features you want to provide.

Website Payments Standard

With this small business merchant account, there is no setup or cancellation fee. It allows an e-tailer to accept a credit card, debit card, or bank transfer payments from anyone with no buyer PayPal account needed. The fee per transaction ranges from 1.9% to 3.9% of the purchase price of goods plus $0.30. The lower rates are charged only after the merchant account has been active for 90 days and sales volume reaches $3,000 or more per month.

There are three options offered for a shopping cart: use the one set up by PayPal (which comes with three different types of “buy” buttons), use your own third-party shopping cart software, or integrate PayPal with a custom-made cart. With the first option, the buyer is directed to the PayPal website. All transactions are secure per PCI data security compliance standards.

Shipping and tax rate charts are easily set up and modified with rates calculated on zip code, country, and/or region. Merchants also have access to sales reports which provide a variety of tools and options to not only view your records, but integrate them with a back-end application. Additional features include inventory management, custom check-out pages, support of multiple currencies, fraud prevention, and Virtual Terminals (which function as an online version of a credit card “swipe” machine).

Website Payments Pro

Another way to make money using PayPal is by setting up a Pro internet merchant account. This option gives you all of the features of the Standard account along with much more. It costs $30 per month and utilizes the same transaction fee structure of the Standard account, with no setup or cancellation costs. However, the biggest advantage is that customers stay on your website to finalize their purchase.

Checkout speed is much faster and your business will receive incremental sales through PayPal’s promotion of their database of merchants. As well, the small business owner can use this account to pay their vendors and can even set up recurring payments for those static monthly bills.

There are a couple things an internet merchant needs to be aware of before selecting this type of merchant account. The PayPal express checkout feature is required to be provided on your website, as is proven PCI compliance for credit card payments. Your shopping cart must be pre-integrated with PayPal or you will need to use a professional website developer to achieve integration with custom software.

No matter which option you choose for your small online business, setting up an internet merchant account is something you may consider doing and PayPal has options worth your consideration.

Learn more about Merchant Accounts.

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