The greatest thing to happen to money since the invention of the debit card. PayPal is now a service of X.com, and is a quick'n'easy way of sending money to anybody with an email account. Extremely popular on eBay and other online auction sites because of its speed and simplicity.

The process works something like this: You sign up and include a credit card number (which can be validated immediately) and/or a bank account number (which takes a bit longer to validate by snail mail). No other fees or charges apply, period.

Once you've done this, you can send money to anyone else with a PayPal account. To make a payment to someone, money is automatically charged to your credit card, unless it's already been transferred into your PayPal account from your bank account at your request. When you are sent money from another PayPal user, you can either transfer it into your bank account or save it to pay to someone else later.

If you want to send or receive money from someone who's not signed up with PayPal, they get an email inviting them to join, with a five dollar incentive for both of you. And there's never, ever a charge for these basic services (only for more advanced ones) -- PayPal makes money by keeping the interest from the money in your account.

Finally, speaking as a web developer, I love their Web site. It's a model of e-commerce because of it's sheer simplicity -- you log in, you send or get money, you log out. The forms are easy to use, the design is simple and uncluttered, and on the whole it's a delight to use. Every online bank should be this easy.

It's only easy if you've been lucky enough never to have a problem with it. If you should run into difficulty, though, such as having your account frozen due to suspicion of fraud due to the operation of various inscrutable automated screening processes of theirs, you'll find yourself in a Kafkaesque bureaucratic nightmare from which you may never extricate yourself. Their customer service department is nearly impossible to reach, and is hostile to customers when reached; even on the occasions that you get in touch with somebody who actually wants to help you, their hands are usually tied by corporate policy. Look on consumer review sites like Epinions for some horror stories.

Tip well in the Donation Box, Nate will love you!
Procedes go to stave off E2 downtime, and pay for bandwidth associated with us abusing this site as we do.
(and i mean really, nate needs deodorant, it's not funny anymore)


No joke. The donation box is made possible by one of the coolest features of PayPal, the ability to custom make an invoice for donations, services, and *gasp* real live products! (i know, as odd as it sounds, people are actually selling tangible objects on the web! but shhh, don't let the investors know...)
I have had problems with them, but their customer service was very responsive and helpful. It was a very silly problem.

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