PayPal claims they’re the easier and safer way to send and receive money. But there’s a lot of stories out there on the internet, saying they’re not. If you search for paypal scary story many of the top result is dedicated anti-PayPal sites that tell their own story of failure. But is PayPal really that dangerous?
PayPal account limits
Of course they’re not dangerous. They’re the fastest and easiest way to setup a payment solution that accepts Visa and Mastercard. You pay a fee per transaction, and you can transfer money to your bank account with ease.
The stories you read about people hitting a brick wall with PayPal, is probably people not reading or paying attention to the limits of PayPal. When you open an account, there a page where you can see your sending, receiving and withdrawal limits. These are very important if you want to do business with PayPal.
To see your limits, click the ‘View limits’ link at the My Account –> Overview page.
The page you’ll see then, shows you your sending, receiving and withdrawal limits.
Notice the ‘Lift Limits’ button? Tick the limit you want to lift, and click the button. A new page is displayed, telling you exactly how to lift your limits.
If you have the ‘Identify yourself or your business type’ link, click it and fill out the form on the page. When you return, you’ll have more options.
The above screens shows you that I’m subject to certain EU (European Union) regulations, but they’re easy to comply with.
You basically have to do the following steps:
- Link and verify a creditcard to your account
- Confirm yourself as a business
- Supply additional information
- Authorize account holder
- Identify account holder.
The reason PayPal wants all this information, is to minimize fraud. As long as you keep your account in good standing, and keep an eye on your limits you’ll be fine.
Only have a single account
Because PayPal does so much to prevent fraud, they keep an eye on not only your account, but also how many different accounts you log into from the same computer. If you have created several business accounts, they might suspend all of them. This is because, they don’t want you to be able to use another account if the first one gets suspended. So use only one account, and one account only.
You can still have a personal account without any of them being suspended.
Use PayPal to get feedback and move on
If you want to start an online business, you want to get going as fast as possible to verify your idea. PayPal is great for this, because they can set you up almost immediately. Use PayPal for this purpose, and if/when you start selling stuff on a regular basis, you can extend your payment setup.