PayPal/Shopping Carts/ Credit Cards

[preppypropaganda]

Hello, First post on Webmaster so bear with me!
I am setting up a site to sell a line of novelty T's that I have designed, and am curious what I need to do legally/tax wise to add a shopping cart/paypay/credit card transaction capability to my site? Do I need to have a sellers liscense to do so? Have my name be a DBA? What do I need to do in order to not get in trouble with the IRS?
At this point, volume isnt high, so am apprehensive about going through the whole permits/Fed id #s etc, as things are so small at this point that am not sure I want to be on the IRS's radar, but know that with credit card transactions, will more than likely be necessary. Any thoughts on other options? Oh, and Does paypal COME with a shopping cart capability?
Thanks for the help! Ecommerce novice here...

[CernyM]

The IRS doesn't care a whit if you have a business license, DBA, or any of that.

If you sell t-shirts and make money from them, the default is that you have to claim it on schedule C of your form 1040.

You don't need a federal Tax ID as a Sole Proprietorship. You can get business banking accounts, paypal accounts, and credit card merchant accounts just fine with your social security number as a sole proprietorship.

If you choose to organize your busines in some other manner (e.g. corporation, LLC, partnership), then you'll need to go through some of the rigamarole of paperwork.

I'm not sure about your state, but in mine, I don't need a "business license," just a sales tax certificate. Each quarter, I have to report to the state what my total and taxable receipts were, and write them a check for the taxable receipts.

Its all actually very, very simple. It only gets time consuming if you do a lot of transactions.

PayPal comes with limited shopping cart capabilities. You may also want to check out Mal's E-commerce which is a very nice entry level hosted (and cheap/free) shopping cart service.

[preppypropaganda]

Great! Thanks for the advice...
On the note of Credit Card purchases, with Paypal, is it just a per use fee? Do I have any other fees to worry about? And any other tax issues to deal with? Just wondering if I have a credit card capability on my site what other fees that I may not have been expecting would hit me there, and what other tax issues may come up.
Thoughts?

[kodaks]

Yes, PayPal is on a cost per use service only. And Paypal only requires HTML for their shopping cart and buy now buttons. Good luck!

[chesworth]

Yeah Paypal does come with a simple HTML shopping cart, although it might be wise to look for a more advanced offering, there are plenty of systems out there that support Pay Pal, a quick search on Google will no doubt find millions of em ;)

[Essex_boy]

Use mal's its the best for what I imagine you want to do and is easily upgraded when you switch to a credit card system.