Is Business Paypal Account Mandatory?

Question

I'm new to Ebay (I sell) but have been receiving payments without any problems.

Now with the 2 most recent payments I get they are being "processed by Paypal."

They want me to upgrade to my account, but it looks like I only have 1 option and that's business.

Help please?

Answer 1

To accept credit cards with Paypal you need to upgrade to either a premier or business account.  The difference in the two is with the business account you can set it up so that if you employees you can have more than one user on the account.  You will have to pay transaction fees if you upgrade.  The fees for both the premier and business are the same.  

Answer 2

You must have customers that are paying with their credit card.

Customers can pay you with their credit card, thru PayPal, without them being "required" to have a paypal account themselves.

With your basic PayPal account, as a seller, you are only able to accept 5 of these "credit card" payments per year.

So, you probably have received the limit, and now to accept more, you need to upgrade your account.

When you list your items on ebay, somewhere in the "payments accepted" area there is a checkbox reading something like "accept Credit cards via PayPal".  You want to NOT check that, then people can only pay if they have a PayPal account, and you will not need to upgrade.

I don't know what you need to do to get those "processing" payments cleared.  Try to call PayPal customer service and see what they can do.

Answer 3

This is because you have to have a business account to receive credit card payments. If you do not want to upgrade you could request that buyers do not pay with credit cards in your auctions. You could also have two accounts, one business and one personal, then register the personal account with ebay and state that buyers must contact you first before using a credit card, then send them an email with instructions to pay the other account. Try looking at other peoples auctions to see how they manage payments.