Yes, PayPal has thorough instructions for setting up an account at www.PayPal.com, but it can take some time to get through the process. Since almost any web product that allows you to sell something takes PayPal as a payment gateway, it's a slam dunk for generating revenue dollars. If there is any possibility that you will use PayPal on your site, we recommend that you start the PayPal process as soon as you start your web site implementation. In fact, since it doesn't cost anything until you start processing transactions, why not start today? Here are the steps: 1) The username...

If you haven't been a victim of credit-card fraud yet, just wait. You probably will be at some point in your life. About 9 million Americans are victims of identity theft each year. To help protect consumers, the credit card companies (Visa, MasterCard, AmEx and Discover) have joined to form the Payment Card Industry (PCI) working group. They set standards for how credit cards and cardholder informaiton is to be handled. If you accept payments on your website, even through PayPal, you need to adhere to these guidelines to protect your customers' payment information. Now I admit, none of us need more rules and regulations to live under. We have better things to do with our energies than go through a checklist that's been handed to us by some anonymous, faceless cabal. But sometimes it's really in our best interest, and in this case, in everybody's best interest.

To refund a PayPal payment: Log onto PayPalClick the History subtab.Find the payment you would like to refund and click Details.Click the Issue Refund link (at the very bottom of the page).Enter the refund amount and click Continue.You can issue a partial refund here. It's a good idea to put a note to the customer about what you're refunding.Confirm the details and click Process Refund. You should note when looking at the orders that you can print a shipping label from PayPal, which simplifies things and is a nice way to track the process!

As a first step in setting up a new PayPal account, you have to list the business name contact under which the account will be known to PayPal (and posted on a lot ofyour client-facing PayPal correspondence). Before you fill out this field, think carefully...think strategically...because once done, it is a colossal pain to change. Want to guess how we know this? You got it...recently had to review for one of our clients.We would recommend that you make this your business name, since you never know if you will retire to the tropics, lose your CPA, etc. Just so you're informed,...