Paypal is a form of payment, often associated with eBay, that gives your customers even more choices when paying for your products or services. Once set up, paypal is a simple and quick pay to pay for auctions or items on websites, buy services, transfer money or otherwise do business.

Some advantages of offering Paypal on your website include:

• Very quick for the customer. No digging for credit cards. No putting in your address or security codes. No hassle, no trouble. The customer makes a purchase in your cart, chooses, paypal, logs into paypal, presses “PAY” and it’s done.
• Links to either a credit card or a bank account, or both. Because Paypal acts as a payment gateway, they connect to the customers payment devices (both checking/savings accounts and also credit cards) and make the transfer into your account automatically. No need for a third party processor (like Authorize.net)
• A Trusted Name online. Paypal has been around for many years now, doing what it does. eBay purchased it a few years back and is making it even better. For the customer, there’s protection against fraud. For the seller, there’s guaranteed money transfer. Everyone wins with double protection.

Paypal setup will cost you per transaction. You can expect 2.9% on purchases plus $0.35 for each transaction. If you already have a credit card processor, leave that processor up to run all of your cards and other transactions and allow paypal to process for those who choose to use it.

For those who use paypal often (as I do for dozens of transactions a month), I’ll often choose a vendor simply because they use Paypal. If the price and features and service are similar there to another vendor without paypal, I’ll always choose paypal first. There’s no match for it’s convenience, especially when I’m moving quickly through the web and trying to finish a number of projects.