• Credit card account number (of course).
• Type of card (VISA, MasterCard, American Express, or Discover).
• The card verification number. For VISA, MasterCard, and Discover, this is a 3-digit number printed printed in the signature space on the back of the card following your account number or the last four digits of your account number. For American Express, the card verification number is a 4-digit number printed small on the front of the card to the right and slightly above the embossed card account number.
• Expiration date (of course).
• First and last name of the cardholder printed on the card. Warning: The last name is assumed to be YOUR last name as you supplied it while creating the account. If you are NOT the person whose name is on the card, you should create the account in the name of the person whose name IS on the card.
• Billing address for the card (every part of the address is needed: street, city, state, ZIP).
• An email address at which you can retrieve address verification email which PayPal sends to you.

If you don’t have all of this information, please get all of it before starting with PayPal. If any of these are missing, PayPal will ask you to provide a personal bank account as a backup money source in case you’re using a stolen credit card or something else goes wrong. If you have all of the above information, you’ll be able to complete the transaction fairly painlessly without providing a backup bank account.

Setting up a PayPal account
If you already have a PayPal account, you can use it if you’re using a personal credit card. Otherwise, you’ll have to set up a new account. You can simply set up a "Personal" account (don’t bother with the "Premiere Account" option) using a straightforward, non-invasive one-page form. On PayPal’s site, you can also watch an online demo of the entire account setup and transaction process.

Verify your email with PayPal
When you submit your account setup information, you’ll then be asked to verify your email address. Since PayPal uses your email address as your unique account name, it wants to ensure that information sent to this address actually reaches you. PayPal will send you an email message containing a clickable link that comes back to PayPal. When you follow that link and enter your PayPal account password, your email address is verified and you’ll be able to actually send money.

PayPal will give you the option to verify your email address later. If you choose to do it later, it will give the Internet more time for PayPal’s verification email to get to you while you’re going to the next step. You’ll have to verify your address eventually, though, or you won’t be able to send money. PayPal walks you through email verification whether you do it now or later.

Preparing to send money by adding a credit card
If this is a new account, you’ll need to add your credit card info to your account before you can use the card. Click on the “Add Credit Card” option on the left.

You’ll be asked to supply all of the credit card information above, and all of it must be accurate as a deterrent to fraud.

We admit that setting up an account on PayPal takes more effort than using a web-based shopping cart, but WTBA doesn’t have a credit card merchant account—and if we did, we’d have to raise the price of the conference if we did in order to pay the startup, monthly maintenance, and transaction fees on the account. But PayPal is easy to use as long as you follow these instructions.

If you’re on per diem and want to use a second credit card to pay for the Wednesday night banquet, create separate PayPal accounts
Since the billing address and ownership info on the two cards is probably different, the safest approach is to create separate PayPal accounts such that both accounts match the respective credit card billing addresses. Note, however, as a fraud deterrent, that PayPal will NOT let you or anyone else use the same credit card on more than one account.

While you can have any number of PayPal accounts, your email address is your account name. If you have more than one verifiable email address (i.e. an address that delivers email to you one way or another), then you can create multiple accounts at the same time by using different email addresses. Otherwise, you’ll have to create an account to match your first card, send money with that card, close and delete the first account (see instructions for this, below), then create a new account with your sole email address and repeat the above (sorry!). Fraud deterrence, like counter-terrorism security, costs us all extra time.

If you find yourself spending more than 25 minutes with PayPal or it asks you to back up your credit card with a bank account, abort!!
We added the credit card option as a convenience, not to torture you. If PayPal asks you to give it a bank account number then you probably didn’t supply everything it wanted to know about the card (especially the card verification number) or it has some other reason to suspect you are not the owner of the card.

If you need to abort the PayPal process, (1) please let us know that you’re mailing a check, (2) make the check payable to "Western Trailbuilders Association", (3) clearly mark the check as payment for a particular person(s) so that we know who the check pays for, and (4) snail-mail your check to:

WTBA Conference
10585 Saxon Way
Truckee, CA 96161-1152

WTBA’s Federal Tax ID# is 98-0681233. Regular snail-mail is OK as long as we receive it on or before Feb. 5.

If you registered with WTBA earlier and are now returning to finish a PayPal transaction
WTBA will honor your original conference registration and your original conference fee rate—even if the lower-priced prepayment deadline of January 24 has passed.

If you’re on per diem and are using two credit cards, you’ll have to “Send Money” twice
Assuming that you set up two accounts, send the appropriate amount of money from each account with your respective credit cards. Make sure that you remember which card is which—transactions complete instantly and are hard to undo (PayPal has to undo them, not WTBA).

Closing your PayPal account
After all of your transactions are succcessfully completed, you may want to close and delete your PayPal account (especially if you set it up with someone else’s card). Close and cancel your PayPal account with these easy steps:

1. Login in to PayPal (www.paypal.com) with your account name (i.e., your email address) and PayPal password.
2. Click the "My Account" tab on the left of the main menu.
3. Click the "Profile" submenu tab that appears on the far right.
4. On the lower left, under Account Information, click “Close Account". On one or more following pages, PayPal will ask you if it's OK to cancel all pending transactions, so say it is OK.

That’s it—you’re done.