PayPal - Beginning the Tour

So those of you following along, we have signed up for our free PayPal account. Now we’re going to begin our tour of the vast PayPal site and go over some of the main items there. There’s going to be an
enormous amount of material to cover, so just take things nice and slow and you’ll be just fine.

Probably the first place we should start is with the 3 types of PayPal accounts so that you understand the differences between them and the advantages and disadvantages of each one.

Personal Account – This is the most basic PayPal account. As with all the PayPal accounts, you can send money with a personal account. You also get 24 hour fraud protection, which is a nice thing. This way you don’t have to worry about others ripping you off with a bogus sale item. You also get free customer service from PayPal as well, regardless of the type of account. Where the personal account is lacking is in the following areas:

Ebay Tools – You get very limited access to running an Ebay business with a personal account. So, if you’re planning on doing so, it is suggested that you upgrade to one of the other accounts.

Merchant Services – This is probably one of the biggest reasons to upgrade from a personal account. You get very limited merchant services which virtually make it almost impossible to sell your own products through PayPal. The restrictions on monthly volume and other things make personal accounts pretty useless if you want to sell things online.

Accept Credit Or Debit Cards – This is also a feature that is quite limited with a PayPal Personal Account. If you can’t accept credit or debit card purchases, the number of people you can sell to is greatly limited.

Also, with a personal account you have absolutely no access to a PayPal ATM or Debit Card and do not get multi user access, meaning you can’t set up more than one email address in your personal account. This also makes it hard to do business if you have more than one business and have different domains and
email addresses for each one. If you want to accept payments through multiple email addresses, a personal account will not let you do this.

As you can see, unless you’re just an occasional buyer or seller, taking payments from others strictly through PayPal funding, a personal account is pretty useless, at least in my opinion. The plus side of this account is that when you have a transaction, where you sell something, there is no fee attached to it. In other words, if you sell something for $100, you get the whole $100. With the upgraded accounts, this isn’t the case.

In the next post, we’re going to pick up our review of the different accounts, continuing with the Premier Account. See you then.