Even for small businesses, they provide a good service for little cost. Many small businesses (like the web sites for many Highland dress retailers) cannot afford to pay someone to design and host an internal shopping cart system from their web site. So it's either not accept on line payments (which means, in practice, loosing a whole lot of sales) or using a system like PayPal to set up your on line shopping cart. Yes, they take a fee from payments sent in through them. But so does every major credit card. Yes, PayPal takes a slightly higher fee, but they are also providing a service, for which they rightly expect to get paid.

And note now that you do not even have to have a PayPal account in order to send money throgh Pay Pal. When you order something on line from a web site that uses Pay Pal for their shopping cart, it's just like if you ordered from any other site with any other shopping cart system. Somebody is getting paid for their service somewhere.

Pay Pal has enabled a lot of small, web based businesses and individuals to accept credit card payments on line who otherwise would not be able to offer this service. So let's not knock them too badly, eh?

M