Starting a PayPal Business Account
You can setup a PayPal Business Account in minutes. Simply go to the PayPal homepage and select “Business” as the account type. You will see several PayPal merchant services plans to accept payments online. To accept payments online, PayPal has two plans on offer, both free of set-up and cancellation fees; Website Payments Standard (WPS) and Website Payments Pro (WPP). The former is easy and fast to set up and has no monthly subscription fee. Selling single or multiple items, offering subscriptions, accepting donations or selling gift certificates, are easy to setup with a simple “Buy now” button. You could even use a preintegrated shopping cart created by Shopify or ASecureCart. Based on a sliding scale governed by the total purchase price, fees range from 1.9% to 2.9%, as well as a transaction fee.
Website Payments Pro keeps Visa and MasterCard users on the e-commerce site during checkout. Combining a payment gateway and payment processor, this plan has a great feature that includes the option to add the Virtual Terminal service. This allows online businesses to accept orders by phone, fax, or mail order. WPP costs $30.00 a month as well as a transaction fee.
To accept e-mail payments without a website, PayPal offers professional invoices that created from the PayPal business account. This plan too does not charge set-up or cancellation fees nor does it charge a monthly fee. Sending an invoice is simply a matter of inserting a payment button into an Outlook e-mail or clicking on the Request Money option in the PayPal business account.