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Using PayPal to Sell Your Ebooks

PayPal facilitates the transfer of money between any two Internet users with an e-mail address.

One of the things that differentiates PayPal from other payment processors is that the seller AND the buyer must both be members of PayPal in order for the transaction to take place.

PayPal works like this...

Both the buyer and seller have PayPal accounts. The buyer can deposit money into his/her PayPal account to pay the seller for his/her goods. The money is transferred from the buyer's PayPal account to the seller's PayPal account. The seller can use that money to buy stuff from other PayPal sellers or have it transferred to his/her 'real life' bank account. (NOTE: The buyer isn't obliged to keep money on his/her PayPal all the time. The exact amount can be deposited at the time of purchase and instantly transferred to the seller's account).

Once you're validated to accept payments, just add one of PayPal's 'Web Accept' buttons to your website. Your customer clicks on the button and then pays you with a credit card or checking account. The payment is sent directly to your PayPal account, and your customer is sent to your ebook download page.

Feature of PayPal's Service

• Both the buyer and the seller must be members of PayPal. This means that your customers, who aren't already PayPal members will have to join in order to buy from you. It must be pointed out that the whole set-up is well organized and integrated into the purchase of your product. Most of your potential customers will have no hesitation in signing up. However, it's inevitable that some people will be reluctant to join up, so you'll lose some potential sales along the way. For this reason, PayPal is, perhaps, not the ideal choice as your first-preference payment processor.

Having said that, PayPal has over 16 million members, so including it as a secondary payment option is a good idea. In other words, you have your usual 'Click Here to Order' link from your main payment processor and below that you have a 'PayPal users click here to order' button. By doing this, you can be sure that those who don't want to join PayPal can buy your products, while still accommodating the needs of existing PayPal members.

• Unlike most other processors, PayPal does not send out regular pay-checks. Instead, you decide for yourself if and when you want to recover money from your account. The amount you decide to recover will be transferred directly to your bank account.

• Setting up to accept credit-card and electronic check payments with PayPal is free and easy.

• PayPal will enable you to accept payments from 38 countries worldwide.

• Both the buyer and seller are notified by email when a transaction takes place.

• PayPal is not specifically designed to deal with downloadable goods only. You can also sell tangible products with PayPal. This means that their system is not designed with downloadable products in mind. However, when you're creating your order buttons, just click the button "Add more options" and you'll be able to enter a URL for successful transactions. Enter your download page URL here.

• PayPal offers a whole host of features related to shipping, taxes and so on. These are useful if you're selling tangible products, but of little use to the downloadable ebook merchant.

• PayPal has both a shopping cart facility and a subscriptions facility. The shopping cart can be useful if you're selling several ebooks on one site. The downside is that you will not be able to put your ordering/download process on auto-pilot. If your customers order more than one ebook using the shopping cart, you'll have to direct them to a 'thank you' page and then deal with delivery of the ebooks manually.

• PayPal offers extensive fraud and chargeback protection.

PayPal service details

Setup
PayPal has no setup fee.

Monthly fees
PayPal has no monthly fees.

Per transaction fee
PayPal's standard transaction fee is 2.9% + 30¢. So, if you sell your ebook for $20, PayPal will take $2.84 from each sale. Better rates are available for PayPal 'preferred' users.
NOTE: There is an additional 1% fee for payments received from a user in another country. This fee is currently waived for Canadian sellers receiving payments from U.S. buyers.

Reserve
As PayPal doesn't send out pay-checks, they have no reserve structure (see jargon).

Chargeback fee
$10.00 chargeback fee for each chargeback processed (see jargon).

Pay periods
You decide for yourself whenever you want to have money transferred from your PayPal account to your bank account. PayPal charges no fee for this if you're transferring money to a US bank account. If you're transferring money to a non-US bank account there is a fee of $1.50. Note, however, that your own bank may also charge a fee to complete the transfer. Talk to your bank for information about this.

Signing up with PayPal

Signing up is easy and free.

Note, however, once you sign up, you'll have to wait until your next credit-card statement before you can begin accepting payments. That credit-card statement will contain a code that you must enter on PayPal's website to activate your account. This is an anti-fraud measure.

Once you've signed up and been validated, just log into your account and follow their instructions for setting up your order buttons.

When creating your order buttons, click the 'Add more options' button to enter the page customers should be sent to once the transaction is complete. This can be your download page.

Ready to take a closer look?
Click here now to visit PayPal's website

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