Hi,
I have used PayPal for ten yrs (about, or however long they have been avail.) and have never had any trouble.
Yes, as another poster mentioned, you would want the pro/merchant PayPal account to be able to accept payments for products. Both the personal and merchant (business) PayPal accounts are free.
If you want to have an affiliate program (Where others also sell your products and you pay them a commission) a PayPal account won't do that. Some shopping carts scripts that will work with PayPal will also allow you to set up and run an affiliate program as well.
One is QuickPayPro -QPP- (It used to sell for about $200, but is pretty easy to find as a free product at give away sites) which you install on your server and it can run your sales, affiliate program, autoresponders, and link tracking (For ads). QPP will use PayPal to process your sales or you can use it with a merchant account.
Another option for sales + affiliate program is ClickBank (
http://ClickBank.com) which has a sign up fee of $50 and also takes a % of each sale. They will take the payment for you, pay the affiliate their % (If it was a referred sale) commission, take their % fee, deliver the product (If it is digital like audio or an ebook, etc.) to you customer along with a receipt. Then directly deposit your profit (What's left) every 15 days for all of your sales since the last 2 week payment all at once. (Not per sale).
The disadvantage of ClickBank is the set up fee of $50. If you don't have a script installed on your hosting account (You can buy one, or like the QPP script find one free through the web master give away sites) that allows you to sell multiple items through one "item"s account then you will pay $50 per item to set them up through ClickBank to sell them.
Also, without the script, any resellers would have to sign up to resell your items separately. Well, actually find the link codes separately.
Another better option is paydotcom
http://paydotcom.com (Yes, the "dotcom.com" is correct at the end) - where there is no set up fee, you can be an affiliate for others, get your own affiliates, and sell products all through one free account. Of course, they take a % of the sale as a fee, but there is not "set up" fee and you can have affiliates.
Another option is a hosting company like third sphere -
http://thirdsphere.com - Where your hosting account comes with QPP pre-installed (It is their own "name" version, but the same script) so for the monthly fee of $24.95 you get hosting, and some free products, the ability to convert docs to PDFs (If you don't have Adobe), other nifty features, and all of the QPP script features mentioned above. As with the above QPP you still have to have a PayPal business or merchant account to process the payments through the built-in shopping system.
Oh, I forgot to mention that QPP can be set up as a shopping cart - where multiple items can be purchased or as a product by product purchase link system, but not both at the same time.
Also, you should get a thawte or other security encryption system to protect credit card info during transmission (About $75/yr though most hosting companies) if you are self-installing and hosting the script.
The PayPal, ClickBank, PayDotCom.com options (And other "service" based options) all have that included.
Sure, someone is bound to post about $6/mo hosting, etc. VS the thirdsphere option - and you can do that if you are OK installing scripts or don't want the extra features - but it wouldn't be a full answer if I didn't mention all of the types of solutions to your problem right?
One final option (That can think of off the top of my head) is a shopping cart service like 1shoppingcart (
http://1shoppingcart.com and others own "custom" versions of the same service at different URLs.) in addition to your hosting account which not only processes sales like paydotcom and ClickBank, but also includes a sequential autoresponder, your affiliate program, link tracker, etc.
It is equivalent to paying for someone else to run / host your QPP-like script (In fact QPP is the script 1shoppingcart used to use) on their server. You pay a monthly fee depending on how much or little of the service you need ranging from about $20/mo for just the autoresponder service up to about $75 for everything including the secure server.
Of course, you may recall I mentioned third sphere hosting for $25/mo... and it has the same cart, autoresponder, etc. services and hosting (This used to be a big tip from me that I was surprised others hadn't figured out!) so don't go hosted shopping cart without looking hard at the thirdsphere option.
I actually used thirdsphere hosting for just the cart service and extras and hosted my sites somewhere else for a while, until I got the hang of scripts, etc.
Now I use lypha hosting (
http://lypha.com) for the huge storage size per hosting account for about $8 a month and either PayPal or an installed shopping cart script for my sites.
OK, I think that should get you started.... don't hesitate to ask any questions on this answer
Have an awesome day!
"Techie" Teri
PS. I hope it is OK to use the links - they are just to make it easier for you, they aren't affiliate links etc.
Online Payment Solutions?
PayPal ok, a couple of alternatives too
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