}
I've had a PayPal account for donkey's yonks but I've never really used it. In the past it's been a pain to upload funds, then pay for things because here in New Zealand paying online has largely been the realm of credit/debit cards and any other payment system is pretty much second class citizen.
A few months ago I was listening to a podcast designed specifically to help people to make money from their woodworking projects. This one episode that changed how I perceive PayPal forever was brilliant. They were talking about what accounting and invoicing systems each were using and one of the main podcasters in the show said he used PayPal. I was taken aback by this because it's something I had never considered.
Well, the other day I put up a Hitachi Plunge Router on Facebook Marketplace. I know this sounds silly to use Facebook in this day and age but I'm not kidding I LOVE Marketplace. In New Zealand the main goto is TradeMe which is New Zealand's version of eBay. It's good to find stuff but it really sucks when selling. I had a couple of tools I wanted to sell and on TradeMe I didn't even make half of what I wanted but because I had put $1 reserve I had to sell them for what they went for. $1 reserve is a trick people use to get people interested. It's a gamble and the gamble did not pay off. But the first time I sold something on Facebook Marketplace I got 100% of what I was asking. Sure, other sales since then have been a mix of haggling and 100% but I'm happy with that.
So within minutes I was getting people from all over wanting this router. And one guy was super keen. So I jacked everything up with him and shipped it off to him. I made up an invoice using PayPal and sent it to him. It was more for his records. But the invoice has a pay by PayPal option and the guy decided to use that instead of the bank transfer.
So how easy was this method? Super easy is the only thing I can say. However I will need to add PayPal's fee structure in order to make what I want. The fees are reasonable though. 3.4% for New Zealand selling or 4.4% for International. This covers all credit and debit card processing which is often a pain to do for personal or small business transactions so it's pretty easy to just factor this into the price which I have done using a Numbers spreadsheet. I find most accounting packages don't do what I want so a spreadsheet will work nicely.
By creating an invoice using PayPal you automatically get a button added to the invoice that allows people to pay via PayPal. This is fast and works better than a bank transfer. All fees are taken out on payment and you don't have to worry about anything. From there you can either leave it all in PayPal or send to bank account. Sending to bank account will incur another fee but the thing to remember is that systems are moving money around and the banks will always ensure that they are going to get paid for doing nothing so I'm not fussed by the fees to be honest.
So once I get my small wood working business setup I will definitely be using PayPal. I'm already building a website that has a shopping cart that uses PayPal for processing payments so once that's up and running things will be easier. I'll then setup a Facebook page specifically for that business and use a mix of the two systems. I do have to keep the tax man happy though so Numbers is going to be instrumental in keeping my records.
But if/when PayPal implements cryptocurrencies then that's going to make things even more interesting. Having the ability to have customers pay me with cryptos would add another little advantage over other companies here in New Zealand. We'll see. It would need to be dead simple if PayPal are going to get involved due to their systems designed for laypeople.
So all I can say is I'm glad I listened to that one podcast episode. How many people would have though of using PayPal as their accounting system? Not me for one but from my experience I'm going to use it exclusively. Sure not everyone will use this method but it gives me every option available to me with little hassle. For small businesses I'd seriously recommend looking at PayPal as an option. It's cheaper than most invoicing systems I've used and can easily be done through webpage or mobile. It's super simple and helps you keep track of a lot of things.
