17 points every PayPal account holder should know.

If you have a PayPal account and find yourself struggling with their plans, fees, TOS, different account types etc then the following points are must read for you. Do check o ut the money saving tip in bold.

1. There are three types of accounts in PayPal. Personal, Premier and Business. Personal vs Premier vs Business
2. A single person can only have two accounts with PayPal. One Personal Account and other Premier or Business Account. Each account should have a unique email address, bank account and credit card associated with it.
3. Opening a PayPal account and sending money from a PayPal account is completely free of charge for all three account types.
4. Receiving funds from a PayPal account:
   1. To your personal PayPal account is free.
   2. To your premier/business PayPal account involves fees.
5. You can also receive funds from from a credit/debit card.
6. With personal accounts you can only accept five credit/debit cards payments while incase of premier/business accounts there is no such limit.
7. Receiving funds from a credit/debit card to your personal PayPal account involves higher fee than premier/business account. Fee varies by country. Check out fee structure for US based PayPal account holders and fee structure for India based PayPal account holders.
8. Premier/Business account holders can also accept payment through credit cards without asking the payee to register with PayPal.
9. If you have a premier/business account, you cannot accept business funds to your personal accounts. It means you can’t ask your website visitors to put money in your personal account instead of premier/business account. However you can accept funds from your affiliate/advertising network in your personal accounts.
10. Money Saving Tip: If you are a premier/business account holder and have a good standing with PayPal you can apply for merchant rates. Merchant rates attracts lower fee than normal premier/business accounts rates. To qualify for merchant rates you should have received more than $3,000.00 USD in PayPal payments in the previous calendar month.
11. Premier/Business account holders have access to premium customer service. You have the facility to call them, send an email via the contact form or send a snail mail.
12. Don’t let your money stagnate in PayPal account. Invest in PayPal Money market fund and see your money grow.
13. Something for your protection. Never click a PayPal link in your email. There are lots of phishers around. It is always advisable to directly type-in the URL.
14. While opening a PayPal account, use a Gmail address. Gmail has put in place some special authentication for PayPal wherein you will never find a PayPal phishing messages in your Gmail account.
15. For simple needs, PayPal also provides a inventory management feature under merchant tools. Now no need to go for those big online shopping carts.
16. If you are a merchant and want to find and test out how that PayPal button would behave in real time. Check out PayPal Sandbox
17. If you are a PayPal account holder from outside US be prepared to shell out large sum of money as PayPal fee. Even while withdrawing money(in your currency) to your account, PayPal has its own exchange rate which is always lower than the current exchange rate. I wish PayPal could look into this uneven fee structure. For instance: If you are from India and assume you receive $100 in your account and current normal exchange rate is $1 = Rs50. The actual amount what you will get in your PayPal account would be $95.8 (3.9% of $100 + $0.3) and if you chose to withdraw to your bank account in India, the amount you will receive would be around Rs 4358 (PayPal exchange rate is Rs1.5 lower than normal exchange rate). All in all a loss of Rs 642 for an amount of $100!

Tagged as: PayPal, tips