If you are in to internet money transactions such as buying books from Amazon, participating for auctions at eBay, you will surely know what PayPal means. This short article targets people who haven’t used PayPal for transactions so they get a brief idea about this world wide, popular money transaction method.
PayPal is an e-commerce business which allows users to transfer money through the internet. It acts as not only the traditional way of transferring money but also as a means of electronic transfers up to a certain degree. User being in control for the transaction, availability, ease of use and being connected to number of financial institutions has made PayPal popular among the Internet savvy busy people. PayPal earns money by charging a fee for the transactions made by users. PayPal has three main types of accounts and they carry different facilities. When it comes to personal account, the limitations are high and others cannot make direct payments to your PayPal account using their credit cards. When it comes to other two types, there are less transaction limitations but transaction fees maybe higher.
Usually the fee charged by PayPal has two components. One is percentage of the transaction amount and the other is a fixed amount. There are five basic factors that decide the transaction fee you may have to pay for your transaction: the currency used, the payment option used, transaction originating country, destination country and recipient’s PayPal account type.
When it comes to the internet money transfers, the alarming thing is security. In terms of technology, PayPal uses a fully protected (using SSL) website for performing transactions. Also, their authentication mechanism is an advance process where email and credit card verification is included. This way, they make sure the user is a genuine user who has a valid credit card for transaction. But the nightmare happens from some of these “genuinely” registered users. Using their PayPal accounts, they try to defraud others. This is very much common among eBay auctions and PayPal users should thus, take great care when dealing with suspicious vendors/buyers.