Selling on Ebay-Accepting Payments

So you want to sell something on ebay.com, but aren’t sure how to receive payment from a bidder for your goods.

There are essentially four ways to accept payment for a completed auction.

The first and most popular way to accept payment is also the fastest way to receive payment. Many sellers use PayPal.com to accept credit card payments from bidders who want to pay this way.

Many bidders love to use PayPal.com to send an fast and easy payment for their item. It really is a smart choice to accept payment via this method because many bidders only bid on items that accept paypal.com payments.

Opening a PayPal account is free.

The second most common payment method is for the bidder to send a money order through the mail to you. This takes more time because you don’t want to ship an item until payment is received, so the time between auction end and when the item leaves your hands is increased by several days.

The third option is to accept a personal check from the winning bidder sent via mail. Many sellers do not accept personal checks because of past experiences with bad checks. Some do accept personal checks but will not ship the item until the check clears the bank increasing waiting time for shipment even more.

The fourth way to accept payment is for the winning bidder to send you cash in an envelope. Hardly any sellers accept cash simply because it can very easily be stolen.

If you do choose to accept cash be sure to have the buyer disguise the cash within the envelope.

Which ever methods you choose to accept payments-never ship an item until you have recieved payment on full. If you accept personal checks , do not ship until the check clears the bank (usually 7-10 days)

Tomorrow we'll talk about shipping the items you sell and how to motivate past bidders to bid from you again.