Increasing numbers of auction sellers explicitly state in their seller's policies that they only accept PayPal. The reason is simple. The eBay-owned payment service enables an auction seller who doesn't have a merchant account to accept payments from winning bidders who pay with credit cards, bank transfers, debit cards, or checks.

PayPal's advantages include:

• Almost immediate payment when the winning bidder uses a credit card or debit card

• The ability to print postal service or UPS shipping labels from your computer and pay shipping charges online

• The ability to track your postal or UPS shipments while in your PayPal account

• Protections against buyer chargebacks and fraud

• Payments can be made in U.S. dollars, Canadian dollars, Australian dollars, euros, pounds sterling, and yen, with currency conversions immediately available online.

Some of PayPal's features and services are free for buyers and sellers. When a buyer makes an auction payment to a seller, PayPal deducts a transaction fee from the seller's receipts. In 2005, the transaction fee was thirty cents, plus 2.2 percent or more of the sales price (depending on the amount received), and bidders in nearly sixty countries could use PayPal. To ensure transaction safety, PayPal uses encryption technology and the Secure Sockets Layer protocol to keep computer hackers at bay.