Become a Home Based Travel Agent

PayPal, Merchant Services and You!
By: Tom Ogg

One look online reveals cruise pricing at levels we haven’t seen since 9/11. While this is great news for clients that can take advantage of the aggressive pricing actions, it is bad news for agents that are working solely on commissions. But, the question always arises on how to process miscellaneous and service fees if an agent does not have a merchant account, which is very difficult to obtain as a travel agent. In today’s online world, an agent needs to be able to collect pre-set fees from a website, sell various optional excursions and services in a shopping cart environment and present individual invoices for service and extraordinary fees in a digital environment. Once these tasks would have presented a daunting task and would have required a very sophisticated web platform and payment gateways on secure servers to merchant accounts. Thank goodness for web 2.0 and technology, because today anyone can perform these tasks with a minimal learning curve.

PayPal.com has emerged as the “go to” site for global settlement of financial transactions across currencies. In addition to offering settlement services to every person on the planet, PayPal.com has evolved effective merchant services for business that market on the web too. No longer does a travel agent have to try to qualify for his or her own merchant account. This has been something that banks have been quite hesitant to do because of the small margins in the travel industry and relative large amounts of money that may be processed. A travel agent wanting to sell his or her own shore excursions, for example, would find it tough to locate a bank that would allow them to use a merchant account to settle the transactions. Now with PayPal.com’s merchant services, travel agents can be in business worldwide. They can offer services to clients all over the world and across many currencies and settle the transaction with complete security and effectiveness.

To establish your agency with PayPal.com as a merchant, you just visit PayPal and process an application. It does not cost a cent to apply (in fact, they will make two small deposits into your checking account, as part of the process) It takes a couple of days to be processed, but once you are, here is what they offer and how it works.

Buy It Now
Buy it now is great if you want to offer to accept credit cards for a sale. Let’s say that you have packaged a special group cruise that includes transfers, hotels, the cruise, special shore excursions and other ingredients that you have assembled and are offering to a group. You can use the “Buy It Now” PayPal.com function to establish a button on your website that allows clients to use PayPal.com to settle their purchase. When he or she clicks on the button, they are taken to PayPal.com and presented an invoice with your identity on it with full description of what they are buying. They simply enter their credit card information and that is it. It is safe for the client because you never see their sensitive information and it is safe for you because PayPal.com is completely on top of the settlement process and uses award winning anti-fraud software that will protect you. To use “But It Now” simply log into PayPal.com, click on “Merchant Services” and then click on “Create Buttons – Buy Now”.  This will launch a dialog box that allows you to describe the item, price and many other attributes for your “Buy it Now” button. You can even use your own creative buttons if you want. Once you have defined the button simply click on “Create Button” at the bottom of the form. This will generate HTML code, which you paste into the HTML code on your website. It is that simple.

Add To Cart
Building a shopping cart environment could not be easier. Let’s say you have a cruise group and want to offer several commissionable or packaged shore excursions to your group to purchase from you. Once you are logged in to PayPal’s merchant services, just select the “Add to Cart” option under the “Create Buttons” section. This works the same way as the “Buy It Now” option. A dialog box will open that allows you to define the description, price and other elements of the product or service being offered and once you are done doing so, press “Create Button”. Then simply copy and paste the code into your website where you want the button to appear. You can create as many buttons as you want for all the products and services that you are selling. Each button is stored in a library, so that if you need to change one, you can simply open the dialog box and make whatever changes that you would like. Since all of the various buttons go into the same shopping cart, you only need to create one “View Cart” button that can be used over and over again.

Send Invoice
“Send Invoice” is the best way to bill clients for service fees and other miscellaneous charges. When logged into your account, choose the “Send Invoice” icon or look under “Manage Payments” and select “Send Invoice”. This couldn’t be easier. Simply fill out the dialog box and after the first invoice for service fees, save it as a template. You will e-mail your client your invoice and when they go to pay, they will get full disclosure and security.

Check out the PayPal.com merchant services in action at www.HomeBasedTravelAgent.com website and then click on “Buy Books” You won’t believe how easy it is to set up your own professional payment gateway and shopping cart environment.