What Is All Of This PayPal Hype?

Unless you have been hibernating in a cave since May, then you have probably already heard about the new payment service called PayPal.com, or at least seen a banner somewhere.

Paypal was initially created for Online Auction sellers and buyers to easily, quickly, and safely transfer money from buyer to seller, or to accept credit cards. Since then, X.com has bought out PayPal and added even more features, such as a Business Account option for businesses.

PayPal works like this:

You enter your information, such as your name, email address, address, which account you want, etc. Then you choose a password to use with your Paypal account. Not only is PayPal free to use, but you also get $5 for joining and $5 for every person you refer after that. If you sell an item or a service, you are only charged 1.9% of your transaction. There are no other fees involved. When you pay someone from your Paypal account, you are not charged at all.

Many businesses and individuals are now using PayPal. And the best feature of all is the ability to safely transfer money from one bank account to another. It only takes 4-5 business days to set up your bank account with Paypal, and after that, money paid by credit cards or by other means to your PayPal account is transferred electronically to your bank account with the push of a button.

Paypal now has "Purchase Now" buttons to put on your web site that takes the customer to a specified Paypal URL that you have set up where the person can either pay for the specified product on your site with a Visa or Mastercard on the spot, or sign up for a PayPal account and then pay with a check or money order that goes through Paypal.

Examples of how PayPal works:

On the Web: John Doe visits Mary Sue's Flowers-On-The-Go web site. Mary Sue has an arrangement of Red Roses that John Doe wants to buy for his girlfriend. Under the collection of Red Roses is a "Purchase Now" button that takes John Doe to the secure payment URL that Mary Sue set up through PayPal. The secure URL will ask John Doe for his name, address, email, Visa or Mastercard number. After he makes his purchase, Mary Sue will get an automatic email notifying her that John Doe has just purchased the Red Roses. Then Mary Sue will take the necessary measures to create and ship the arrangement to the address that he specified for shipping.

In addition to purchasing the arrangement of roses, PayPal also created a temporary account for John Doe at PayPal using his email address and password that he had specified during his order. This way, if John Doe wants to benefit from PayPal for his business or for personal use, then he can sign in and set up his own account.

In An Email: You can also send someone an invoice in an email using PayPal by simply entering their email address. Then the invoice will be sent to them, with the steps they need to make in order to make payment to you, and they too, will be given a temporary account until they decide to set up their own, if they should ever decide to. And if they are already a PayPal member with a bank account set up, they can just hit the "send money" button in their account, specify your email address, and then the money will be sent to your account. It is that simple, and so easy to use.