Marg McAlister

Hundreds of thousands of businesses all over the world use PayPal on their websites. They use it to:

1. Sell single products (using a PayPal 'buy now' button)
   
2. Sell multiple products (using a shopping cart), and
   
3. Invoice clients for a service (e.g. web design services, copywriting services, ghostwriting services, art work, etc)

You can also use PayPal to pay others, or to accept credit cards on your website. If you sign up with PayPal, then your visitors have a choice of whether to use a credit card or their PayPal account to pay you for your goods/services. Many people prefer to use PayPal to pay for the things they buy, because it involves just a few simple mouse-clicks rather than filling in long forms.

It's a big advantage to be able to take credit cards on your site (through PayPal) without having to set up your own business to take them. It can be quite costly to set up a merchant facility on your site, and by using PayPal, you can avoid this.

How Can You Find Out More About PayPal?

There are many ways to find out what to do... as you might expect, since so many people use it all over the world!

First, there's the PayPal site itself. Spend a bit of time on this, clicking your way around. PayPal lets you experiment with making a 'buy now' button for your goods before you actually sign up.

On the screen capture below, you can see the 'Overview' screen on the PayPal site. You can watch a demo to see how it works (1) and then, by clicking on the 'Payment Buttons' tab, you can give it a try yourself. As you can see, you can create buttons to sell single items, or to sell multiple items with the free PayPal cart, or even to sell gift certificates for products or services!

Second, use Google or another search engine to find more information. Just type in 'How to Use PayPal' and you'll find plenty of help. As you can see on the example below, some of these pages are on the PayPal site itself, and some are on other sites like eHow. I use an anti-virus program that indicates whether they have found sites to be safe - this is useful. (Of course, you should never give out sensitive information to other sites... use them for information, but fill in your details ONLY on the PayPal site itself, and ONLY when you see the golden padlock indicating that it is secure.

Third, look for videos. For example, here's one on YouTube - you can find it at this link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rIauZfXevzw

This is the end of the Introduction to PayPal.

Watch for more articles on using PayPal to sell books and services on your writer's website.