How to quickly accept payments with PayPal. Part 1: Opening an account

The first step: opening a PayPal Business account and linking it to your bank account. It’s free to open an account; you only pay transaction fees when your customers pay you.¹ View fees.

Opening a PayPal Business account (total time: ~10 minutes)

You’ll need a few pieces of information handy to do this:

• Business name and address
• Your date of birth and home address

Step-by-step instructions

1. Visit PayPal.com and click Sign Up.
2. Select business account and click Continue.
3. Enter your email address and click Continue.
4. Now, enter your personal login details and tell us about your business.
5. Make sure you’ve read and understood our Privacy Policy and User Agreement, then click Agree and Create Account.
6. Next, tell us about your business: From the drop-down menus select the business type that best represents your organisation, your business category and sub-category, enter your business URL, country and credit card statement name, then click Continue.
7. You’ll now need to tell us a bit about yourself: Enter your date of birth, nationality and home address then click Submit.
8. Once that’s done, we’ll send you an email and ask you to verify your information.
9. Your account is ready to use.

Linking your bank account (total time: ~5-10 minutes)

Once you’ve set up your PayPal Business account, the next step is linking a bank account where you can transfer your funds.

To quickly link your bank account, you’ll need the following pieces of information ready:

• Your PayPal Business account username and password
• Bank account sort code
• Bank account number

Step-by-step instructions for linking a bank account

1. Log into your PayPal Business account.
2. Click Money on the top of the page.
3. Click Add a new bank account.
4. Enter sort code and account number then click Agree and Add.
5. Next, PayPal will ask for approval to deposit £0.01 GBP into your nominated account. To allow click Submit Pre-approved Payment Instruction.
6. Now you can confirm your bank by entering the 4-digit confirmation code. This can be found by logging into your bank account and finding the code next to the PayPal transaction.

Once you’ve created an account and linked it to your bank, you’re ready to:

• Create and send invoices.
• Set up other ways to accept payments.

If we can help you with any of the above steps, please visit our PayPal Help Centre.