More on ebay

Something else I was thinking about that you should know. You will need to decide what kinds of payment you will accept. During my auctions this past week I elected to accept paypal, money orders, cashiers checks and personal checks. By the time the auctions ended I was re-thinking my decision to accept personal checks. Now ebay is based on the concept that people in general are good and I believe this to be true but we also know there are bad people out there. What if I got one of those bad people? What if their check bounced and it cost me money? My bank charges $20 if deposit a check and it bounces! Luckily everyone paid with paypal and I didn't have to worry about it but this weeks auctions are only accepting paypal, cashiers checks and money orders :)
Now with paypal you have options to think about too. You can have a paypal acct and receive payments for free but your customers will not be able to use their credit cards. This means you limit the number of people who can bid on your item but I see a lot of people doing it this way. If you have upgrade to a premier/business acct you will be able to accept credit card payments. The advantages of paypal are that you get your money right away. The disadvantage is that with a premier or business acct you will be charged a fee, generally around 2.9% of the transaction. So I use paypal for everything and after I upgraded one of my larger payments came in from my business and it ended up costing me over $10 for the transaction. I want to keep the ability to accept credit cards but I don't want to lose a lot of money. So for that particular company I am now requesting my money be sent in a check and I can still use paypal for my smaller ebay transactions without it costing me an arm and a leg. If you also have large payments coming in through your paypal acct you might want to switch those over before upgrading.