By now Paypal has become a huge business almost essential for doing online transactions. The website looks decent and many sellers have trusted using it by using it as a form of making payments to them on their own websites. However, after using PayPal for almost a year now I have some tips for current users and people who are thinking about signing up for an account. First off, your credit cards and bank accounts are safe with PayPal but don't think they are a friendly company. For a regular account they will charge a flat rate of 2.9% plus an extra 30 cents when you receive money except if you receive more than $3,000 a month into your account. If this is the case then the percentage taken by PayPal is lowered to 2.5% and lowered again to 2.2% if you receive more than $10,000 a month into your account. If you are a PayPal fiend and receive more than $100,000 into your account per month you will be charged 1.9% on every transaction with each consecutive level still being charged the (percentage) + $0.30. If you are a seller you must also beware of tricksters! People will send you money only to reverse it and claim that the payment was unauthorized leaving you left without your merchandise or the money you sold it for. Be sure to document every single peice of evidence that you can when you sell an item through PayPal but this still may not be enough for PayPal to reverse its decision in paying the buyer back their money. Say you keep $0 in your PayPal account and you make a sale for $50. If you put that $50 into your bank account and the buyer then decides to dispute that transaction and PayPal decides to award them that money back then your paypal balance will be -$50. Although this was not fair to you PayPal will still make you pay them back or they will contact you just like a regular debt collector would. If you decide not to pay them they will eventually put it on your credit report so you really have no other choice. My opinion is to use PayPal only when absolutely necessary such as buying from a site that you wouldn't trust your credit card with but if a face-to-face transaction is available then do that. As a merchant I would still have to use it because it has become internationally accepted as an easy form of payment although I don't like the potential for fraud.