The New ebay: The Official Guide to Buying, Selling, Running a Profitable Business

Chapter 30

Accepting and tracking payments

We’ve covered the various payment methods previously, in parts III and IV, but in this chapter we’ll explore the most efficient ways of accepting and tracking payments for your eBay business.

PayPal

Because it’s owned by eBay, PayPal has been very well integrated into the transactional functions within eBay. As outlined previously, when one of your buyers pays using PayPal, eBay automatically syncs that payment with your Selling Manager views so you don’t need to check your PayPal account for paid status. Coupled with the ability to click on links from the sales record directly to the corresponding PayPal record, this means that the more buyers who use PayPal, the less time and energy you spend collating payments with the correct buyer.

Let’s take a moment to look at the PayPal website to highlight a few additional features of this payment mechanism. Log into your PayPal account to view your account overview (see figure 30.1).

At the top of the page under My Account are links to various functions on the PayPal site:

• Overview. The default view shows a list of all recent transactions.

• Add funds. This allows you to withdraw money from your bank account and deposit into PayPal (if you have linked one to your PayPal account).

• Withdraw. This allows you to withdraw a positive balance from your PayPal account into your linked bank account.

• History. View and search across all of your PayPal transactions in the past. ...