PayPal questions???

[Dr89]

so i've had a paypal account for quite some time but i've only used it to buy things on ebay. i got on my actual account today for the first time ever because i have some things i want to sell and stuff and just want to start using it more....my question is, as a "personal" account holder can i RECIEVE money through paypal? or am i only authorized to send it? if i can recieve money through it, what does it charge? fairly naive questions but i just havent used it nearly enough to know...

[shadowwalker]

I believe you can receive money through a personal account, but you cannot receive credit cards through it. I have had a business account for quite some time, so I'm not 100% positive on this.

They charge you 2.9% + 30 cents to receive funds I believe.

[Rulz]

You can receive money from a personal PP account. If you do, just make sure you transfer it to your bank account ASAP once it shows up in your PP account. If you upgrade to the premier account, they start charging you something like 3% for each transaction. I never upgraded my account and I was never charged a transaction fee, either to receive money or pay out money. They do try and force you to upgrade your account all the time though. And if someone pays you via a CC, you cannot accept that payment until you upgrade.

One word of warning though, I no longer use paypal. I sold a PS3 a couple years ago, received payment for it, before I had a chance to move the funds into my bank PP had clamped down on my account and I could no longer access my funds or transfer funds. I ended up loosing $1,100 and fought them for 6 months to get my money back, never did!

Just google paypal issues and you'll find these type horror stories all the time with PP!

[Dr89]

wow that sucks, doesnt that like...contradict the whole point of paypal in the first place? how/why would they do that?

[Rip_Tear]

If you read the paypal info they tell you all of the info you are asking for. With your personal account you have restrictions, like a max # of in and out $ as well as payment types. I am not sure of all of it, but I know it's there to read if you look for it. You can also always phone paypal and talk to them about it and they are very good at explaining and sorting out things out for you.

Rulz, not to try and butt heads with you, but what it sounds like is you were basically going beyond the set parameters of your account, which is why Paypal was trying to get you to upgrade.

If you plan to do a lot of buying and mainly selling with your account, you basically need to have the high account, Paypal and Ebay have gotten in trouble due to the fact that they have basically allowed people to run businesses without being registered and charging them appropriately for tax/etc reasons.

[Dr89]

yea i read through a whole bunch of stuff on paypal.com but i didnt know if i should go ahead and get a bank account registered through it or not, because the only thing i've done so far (and probably will mostly do in the future) is buy stuff, so just the credit card works fine for that....but to recieve money i couldn't figure out if i HAD to set up with my bank account, or what i needed to do for people to be able to pay me.

PP just seems to be the easiest way to do things over the internet so i want to try to get set up with it a little more.