We use Paypal almost exclusively as our payment processor. It works well for several reasons. 1. Makes monthly revenue, payroll and P & L accounting much easier. Paypal keeps a record of all transactions - debits and credits. 2. Eliminates the need for your business to have its own Merchant Account. These can get costly and there is often some e-commerce web development needed on your part to get services like ZenCart or Magento or your own branded e-commerce store, to work properly. 3. Payments to staff or employees can be done quite easily and quickly. Simply click a 'Send Money' button, enter your contractor's PayPal email address, and PayPal will handle the rest. 4. A professional looking, user-friendly interface. PayPal offers quite a bit of customization to your own payment gateway. You can, for example, create a special landing page that has your business name and/or logo included. And you can set up payment gateway to return the payor to your site after payment is made automatically. With a little advanced API development, you can do even more sophisticated manipulations, like require people to pay through PayPal prior to being able to download something from your site. It is always good, we've found, to have other options, though. Some clients simply will not use PayPal. Others dislike it. So, our firm also uses Google Checkout, which operates similarly to PayPal. With Google Checkout, you can send an email invoice to a customer and then can pay with a credit card or debit card. In addition, we also purchased a Bank of America Business Suite. for $15 / month, I can send direct EFT transfers to customers or staff. I can also send invoices, charge penalties for late invoices, and do some other pretty cool things. And it is all tied to my business checking account for ease of accounting. There are a few drawbacks to PayPal. One is that if you don't follow all their guidelines, a customer complains about your service, or your account gets flagged by their staff for some reason, they can completely freeze all transactions. Sometimes it can take several weeks to resolve these issues. But we haven't had any major problems with PayPal at all.

I have found PayPal to be great for us, the challenge comes in remembering to add PayPal's fee on top of your invoice amount. If you have regular billing amounts rather than custom pricing for every client, I'd recommend creating and saving set invoices with the fees built into your price. I've gotten burned a few times forgetting to add the fee for individual clients and ended up with much less than I bargained for. Other than that, once I got my debit card I had access to my funds right away for making needed business purchases, rather than waiting for the bank transfer. Hope this helps! Lisa R. ATS Professional Learning Center ATSLearn.com -- this post was edited to remove a commercial hyperlink

I give my customers the option of paying via PayPal. For many it's more convenient than paying by check, etc. I do my invoicing outside of PayPal for various reasons, but all of my invoices contain instructions on how to pay via PayPal. You do need to account for the fees that PayPal will deduct from your payment, so just be aware that you will not receive a small percentage of each payment. However, talk to your accountant about how best to treat those fees for income tax preparation.

Online payment services have recently become very poplar with businesses and consumers. You can read more about PayPal and other online payment services on Business.gov: http://www.business.gov/manage/finances/online-payment-services.html

If you are doing a lot of online businesses i recomend you strongly to use PayPal- It is very reliable, you have absolute control and most important it is safe. Be sure to have a unique password, i have bad experience with it: I used only one password to multiple websites and one of them has hacked into my PayPal acount and stole 25$ (i don't know why just 25$), but just after couple of hours PayPal have returned me the money.

Paypal is a great and safe service but I had encounter some problems using it things like my subscription automatically being cancelled. Also I had encounter this one I have a subscription that is not listed in my recurring payment and yet I get billed I have to wait for the monthly notice to arrived and click the cancel link in the notice. So I was force to pay for another month. But I believe it is still the best option out there in terms of safety, reliability and availability.

Although I have never had any problems with PayPal, the stories persist of others who have, both vendors and customers. I was reluctant to use PayPal for quite some time as both. I sell a software product, and on the sales page I offer a PayPal button and its equivalent pay button from Amazon. The Amazon button has been an effective alternative for me.

I just had another bad experience with paypal. I transfer fund to paypal and withdraw it to my bank (a previuosly verified bank account that I have used before), a few hours later my account was put into the limited access list pending verification. They reverse the bank withdrawl. Why do they have to wait when I transfer fund before they do this. I was really very disappointed as it delay the withdrawl by 2 days. Now I have to pay penalty since I cant cover bills.

Of course PayPal is a widely used both website owners to take payments and clients to pay services. I think that this solution is great. Even if you are website owner and decide to deal with other payment processor I would advise you to add PayPal as an alternative. Many people usually find it very convenient to pay servicess using this way. So, in my opinion PayPal should be always provided for your clients. Otherwise you may lose some sales.

I am a freelancer and my client uses paypal to pay me. You can use the business option instead of personal. & if you don't wish to have future problems with PP, make sure all data from bank to PP tallies. It won't be easy to change crucial details on PP because you'll have to contact their customer service. I've gone through that sort of trouble and what i did was create another paypal account. But since then, i've encountered no problem.