Simon Carr: The Kitchen Capitalist

The story so far: the author has sold his house to finance a manufacturing project in the hope of making a small fortune to finance his old age...

I found my merchant number! It doesn't take much to make me happy. We know each other well enough for you to know I say that a little gloomily. My "merchant number" was on the retailer agreement under the delivery box of the card-processing terminal. It's been kept by the sink for a week. Hygiene is important in the modern workplace. Washing-up liquid has caused the ink to run, but I can still make out the numerals. Without my number, I wouldn't be able to process telephone orders. When I work out which buttons to press, I'll be able to take money over the telephone.

It's all getting very close to the point of action. I can feel my eyes prickle, and that feeling in the stomach you used to get on the high diving board. I've managed to put this moment off several times already. I've shrunk back from the edge. My courage, daring, dash, self-sacrifice is composed, we now know, of large amounts of fantasy. When it actually comes to the point of putting the goods on sale to strangers, I flinch back from the market.

I've been helped in this flinching by the complexity of the transactional arrangements. Despair has come to my aid frequently. No one can be expected to master all these interlocking, self-contradicting, widely dispersed details. It's an imponderable fact that when you find your merchant number, the SMTP co-ordinates for your site e-mail disappear. The payment processes have been particularly destructive.

But then a reader e-mailed me with news that PayPal runs a new, easy-click credit card set-up. Suddenly, I have to face up to my inadequacies. There's no excuse left. Because it seems that PayPal doesn't demand merchant accounts. Banks don't give merchants merchant accounts for internet trading. They'll give you a Card Not Present terminal for telephone orders and a merchant number, but not a merchant account for internet transactions. Why not? I no longer have to care.

Because PayPal does it all for you. I feel like that happy blonde in TV ads. PayPal sets it all up for you without 900,000 trade references. They have a shopping cart that you append to your website. So, we're there. All we need now is something to sell.

People will go to a website, enter their details and send money to my bank account. I never even see it. Like magic. It makes life what we always thought it could be. Despite my "merchant number", I can be a gent. Private income. So private I won't even know where it's come from. Cyberspace provides.

When my boys were very young they'd ask for things and I'd say: "I haven't got any money." They'd react brusquely: "Write a cheque, then!" They may be proved right after all.