Signing up with PayPal

In the last post, I gave a brief introduction to what PayPal actually was. Here, we’re going to dive right into the sign up process and begin going over the many parts of your PayPal account.

To get your own PayPal account, you have to go to the following URL:
https://www.paypal.com/
After you do this, you will notice in the upper right hand corner of the screen a link that says Sign Up. Click on that now! When you get to the next page, you’ll first be greeted by a box that asks you for the country in which you live. This is required because PayPal is not accepted all over the world just yet. So if you lived in
say, Saudi Arabia, and went through the list of countries, you would find that your country is not listed. You will find that currently there are 103 countries that are listed at the PayPal site where you can get a PayPal account.

After you choose your country, you will then notice that it asks you to choose the type of account that you want. There are 3 types of PayPal accounts; Personal, Premier and Business. We will go over these types of accounts in more detail later. For now, just sign up with a Personal Account. The reason for this is because you can upgrade any account at any time. Personal is the best to start with because there are no fees attached to it for doing business. So click on where it says “Start Now” under the Personal Account column.

You will then be presented with a page where you are going to have to fill in a bit of information. Make sure you fill in everything except where it says optional for mobile telephone. Yes, your regular telephone is a required field. Also, make sure that you choose a password that is at least 8 characters long and is also not easy to guess. People are always trying to hack into PayPal accounts. You may have noticed many emails coming to you claiming to be from PayPal asking for your password for some bogus reason. This is why. PayPal hackers are everywhere. So make sure your password is hard to guess.

After you have filled in the form, click on “I Agree, Create My Account” and you will then be told that an email will be sent to you with a link to click in order to verify that your email address is valid. All transactions through PayPal are validated through your email. So make sure you give them one that doesn’t have a ton of spam filters on it otherwise you may not get your confirmation email and as a result will not be able to open up your PayPal account.

After you get your email from PayPal, click on the link inside of it and that will activate your PayPal account. From here you can start setting things up the way you like and even add additional email addresses if you like.

In my next post, we’re going to start our tour of the vast PayPal site. See you then.