As PayPal would have us tell you, "it's fast, free, and secure." All web merchants are faced with the problem of how to best handle credit card processing to accept payment on their site(s). While there are a number of payment processing companies out there--we looked at a number of them--we have decided on PayPal for the following reasons:

• Over two million businesses also trust PayPal to handle their processing needs...PayPal has a strong, well-proven track record.

• In the year 2001, PayPal processed over $4 billion dollars worth of transactions...PayPal has a strong, well-proven track record.

• Reliable customer service is a hallmark of PayPal--they will work to stop any fraud or other illegal activities and this helps both us and you, the end-customer.

• Security? All payments and transactions handled by PayPal are done in a secure environment. Look for the "https" protocol in the Address box--the "s" stands for secure and without getting technical, that means what you're sending and receiving across the net is just that, secure. You'll notice that your browser shows a closed lock when this "https" protocol is in use.

      If you want a little techno-babble about this, we will quote what PayPal says, "PayPal automatically encrypts your confidential information in transit from your computer to ours using the Secure Sockets Layer protocol (SSL) with an encryption key length of 128-bits (the highest level commercially available)." To make a long story short, we have researched this and we believe that PayPal is as secure a payment-processing solution as is available to us.

• PayPal operates in 37 different countries giving us the ability to receive your payments from countries around the world.

• PayPal works with the four most-popular credit cards as well as with eCheck so it is most convenient for you, no matter which is your favorite means of doing business.