PayPal Hacks

Chapter 1. Account Management

Introduction: Hacks #1-9

You can use PayPal to send and receive money, but you need a PayPal account to manage your payments and your business. There’s something comforting about having your own account. Sure, it’s yet another password to remember, but it’s all yours. You can visit a site like PayPal, log in, and see your settings, your name, and your history—proof that you’ve been there before and that someone (er, something) remembers you. But a PayPal account [Hack #1] , in particular, has the added bonus of being able to store cold, hard cash. You can’t really touch it, but it’s there, and it’s yours.

You can use your PayPal balance to pay for stuff [Hack #11] , or you can withdraw it [Hack #20] and add it to the shoebox under your mattress. You can also watch it grow, as your eBay bidders pay for your stuff, web site customers buy your products, or friends pay you back for sushi dinners.

But it’s not about sending and receiving money; it’s about finding new ways to handle transactions so that you can spend more time eating sushi (or curly fries, or whatever). The real power of PayPal is its invisibility; you can have strangers send you money and still keep your account all to yourself. Whether you’re selling a single product [Hack #28] , or a cart full of products [Hack #45] , PayPal can be as slick as you need it to be. If you take things even further, you can have PayPal notify your server [Hack #65] when you receive money, or even write ...