How to Open a PayPal Account

By Marsha Collier from eBay Business All-in-One For Dummies, 2nd Edition

If you want to be an eBay seller and you aren’t registered with PayPal yet (what’s holding you up?), eBay provides a convenient link on your My eBay All Selling page in the Selling links area. To register, just click the PayPal link.

Begin your PayPal registration here.

The PayPal Seller Overview page appears, as shown here. Click the Sign Up Now button, and you arrive at the beginning of the PayPal registration process. Tell them what country you’re from, fill in the basic required information, and you’re in.

Of course, you don't have to go through eBay to register for PayPal. You can go directly to the PayPal Web site and click the Sign Up link.

The convenience of PayPal’s integration with eBay shines when you put the Smart Logo option in your auctions. Winners just click a link that pops up on your auction page immediately after the auction closes. When you list auctions, you preset the shipping and handling charges that appear in the shipping box at the bottom of the page.

The Pay Now button appears after an auction is won.

When winners click the Pay Now button, they’re taken directly to a payment page set up with your information. It’s just as easy as when they purchase something through Buy It Now.

The listing page with the Pay Now button.

If the buyer doesn’t pay immediately, then he or she will see a Pay Now button on the listing’s page when returning to the listing to pay. It will be there until the buyer pays.

The buyer can add optional insurance or combine other items, as shown here. When the final total amount is correct, the buyer is brought to PayPal to pay for the item. The payment is deposited in your PayPal account and held until you choose how you want to withdraw it.

Because credit-card and identity theft is so prevalent on the Internet — and such an expensive burden to e-commerce — PayPal uses the extra security measure provided by Visa and MasterCard called CVV2. This system requires you to input the 3 additional numbers (immediately following the regular 16-digit number) from the back of your credit card. Because merchants aren’t allowed to store these numbers, but merely use them for security and verification purposes, the numbers are presumably protected from hackers.

However, in the unlikely event that your credit card doesn’t have these numbers yet, PayPal still allows you to use your card by verifying it through a procedure known as random charge. PayPal charges about $1 to your card and asks you to disclose the PIN number printed on your statement. Then PayPal knows that you control the card and didn’t steal it.