As your website grows, there may come a time when you’re ready to accept payments from visitors.  Maybe you are selling something, or maybe you are collecting donations?

One of the easiest and most widely used methods of collecting payments on websites is via PayPal.  It’s widely used, has more than 179 million active, registered accounts and allows customers to send and receive funds in 26 currencies worldwide.

PayPal is a free service you can sign up for at www.PayPal.com.  They offer a wide range of tools to create Payment Buttons, donation buttons or even create a simple shopping cart via the PayPal website.

PayPal works a bit like a bank account.  When people want to pay you (via one of the buttons you created) they can either send money that they already have in their PayPal account, or they can pay directly using a Credit Card or Bank Account.

On your end, the money arrives to your PayPal account.  From there you can either use it to purchase other things with PayPal, or after linking up and verifying your bank account, you can withdraw it to your bank account.   They even offer a debit card option which allows you to spend it that way as well.

For a basic personal or simple business account, there is no monthly fee.  They simply charge 2.9% of each transaction + .30 cents a transaction.    They also offer a Pro account which charges the same fee, plus $30/month and allows greater customization of the checkout process and full integration with a third party shopping cart.   It also offers a virtual terminal which would allow you to take credit cards offline or over the phone by keying the transactions into the web interface.

If you’re looking for a quick and easy way to start collecting payments, PayPal offer the simplest solution!