I know a number of people here sell items on ebay, or elsewhere, using PayPal for payments. My wife is starting a home business selling cheesecakes for shipment acros the U.S. She isn't set up for using credit cards yet so she's using PayPal for payments. Last week to try it out and make sure everything was working right I "bought" one of her cakes off her website, and paid via PayPal. The order went through fine, the money was taken out of my account, and now a week later she still hasn't had the money deposited from PayPal into her bank account. PayPal finally sent me an email yesterday, six days later, that the sale had gone through properly, and her PayPal account is showing it's been processed, but still no money.

Is this a typical turn around time, seven days? I've bought plenty of things using PayPal but I've never gotten paid that way so I don't know.

As a second question has anybody who got paid using PayPal ever been burned? I mean if she gets a message that somebody has ordered something and they've paid using PayPal she can't wait a week for it to clear before she ships it. Are there any cases where you've gotten a notice of PayPal payment when you never received the money?

I've emailed PayPal these questions and they just reply with form letters that basically say they're not responsible for delays or lost payments.

I know the solution to this will be for her to get a credit card machine to process card payments, but that's going to have to be down the road until she starts selling more.

The way my Paypal account is set up, any incoming funds stay in the Paypal account until I tell them to transfer it to my bank.

Dave is correct - you have to "tell" Paypal to transfer the money to the baqnk account or it will sit in Paypal forever.

You can get burned if you don't pay attention. Most of the time, people's money will transfer into your account. There has been a couple of times though where the funds were "pending" I always wait for them to clear before I ship.

Mine is like Daves'... you need to tell Pay-Pal to transfer the funds into your bank... otherwise it just sits in the Pay-Pal account.

I believe that it if free to send money via paypal. However I think they charge you to transfer it out of your paypal to your bank account. The best way to reduce fees is for your wife to find other vendors who are willing to accept paypal.