PayPal is a third-party payment service that we and many of our users employ. It's relatively easy to set up and initially is much less expensive than conventional card merchant accounts, although large-volume users may wish to consider alternatives. PayPal is used by some 70 million people, and it can give you the ability to accept online payments quickly.

You can use PayPal for individual payments, for shopping carts with multiple purchases, and for subscriptions (recurring payments). There are two ways to implement PayPal in a Sitemaker site.

Before you or the Sitemaker Team can implement PayPal in your site, you must establish a business account at PayPal. If you already have a personal account, it can be converted to a business account, but the Sitemaker Team recommends that you create a separate account to facilitate good bookkeeping, as there may be tax implications of your online sales.

To begin, you will need your business information, including name, COMPLETE contact information, tax identification, and the numbers and billing addresses of the bank and/or credit card you wish to associate with the account.

The procedure for establishing a account is beyond the scope of this document. If you do not wish to do this yourself, you may consider having the Sitemaker Team implement your PayPal account as part of our implementation service.

As with all Sitemaker features, you can do it yourself. If you are familiar with PayPal's procedures you know that all the code necessary can be generated within their system. To add the code to Sitemaker, just copy and paste the purchasing procedures into suitably formatted text components as appropriate to the merchandise or service you wish to sell.

If you have difficulty doing the implementation, your designer or the Sitemaker Team can help you pick up the pieces at our usual hourly design rate.

The Sitemaker Team or your certified Sitemaker designer create the sales process for you. There is a fee for this service, based on the number and complexity of the items you wish to sell.

1. PayPal

The PayPal account must be verified.

2. Shipping

The easiest applicable method within PayPal is to charge a standard percentage. You're really under no obligation to save people $ on shipping for small orders, nor do you have to apply the same procedure to the PayPal method that you apply to manual orders. Your only obligation is to spell out the costs accurately.

3. Chargebacks

As with any credit processing account, you have a small risk of chargebacks if someone does not acknowledge receipt or returns merchandise.

It is advisable to leave a balance in the account to cover this. For example you could refrain from making no withdrawals for a while to accumulate such a balance. This will keep chargebacks from being assessed against your bank account or credit card.

4. Additional services from PayPal

If you add a credit card to this account (see Profile tab in PayPal), you can qualify for additional PayPal services, including earning interest on any balance in the account. You may wish to ignore this for now and pursue it if your sales warrant the change.

If you have questions or are ready to proceed, contact your account representative.