Steps to getting your website:
Selling Online
About PayPal
PayPal is a widely used online payment provider. You can set up a website to either have a singular "buy now" button (if you're only selling one item), or a shopping basket (for multiple items) which will then take the user to PayPal, where they can use their credit card or PayPal account to instantly send you money.
It is probably the easiest way to do online sales at the moment, but the convenience comes at a cost; depending on your turnover, PayPal will take £0.20 per transaction, and a percentage, usually between 1 - 3 %. There are other online payment providers out there, some of them cheaper, but PayPal has the advantage of being well known, thus giving your potential customers a bit more faith in the online transaction. With the basic PayPal package, you don't pay any annual or monthly fees, so you're only losing money if you actually sell something.
PayPal also has an API service (Application Programming Interface) through which your website can talk to theirs - enabling you to manage complex elements like stock control from one place. API programming is substantially more complicated than just setting up a "buy now" button, and ideally requires secure web space, which can sometimes be expensive.
Verification
PayPal accounts are great once they're set up, but the actual verification process can be very time consuming in spite of some excellent systems designed to aid the procedure. For example, they will need to verify that you own and can access the phone number that your account is registered with: press a button on their website, and a computer gives you a call - all you have to do is pick up the receiver and press a number indicating your approval; if you're a modem user you can even delay it 5 minutes to give you time to hook the phone back in.