On The Button - With PayPal

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This article provides a beginner's guide to setting up a PayPal Buy Now button on your website so that visitors and customers can buy something from you online, as well as a few useful tips that have been learned the hard way.

We'll assume, for ease, that you are selling some form of digital product, such as an ebook or software.

So, the first thing you need to do is to log into your PayPal account. (If you don't yet have one, then you can sign up for a free account here.)

Once you have logged in, you need to click on the Merchant Tools tab, which is near the top right of the screen.

This will take you to a page of tools that you can use to help you in your online business.

The option we want is called Buy Now Buttons, which is a link on the right of the screen in the list of Key Features.

Here is where we get into the meat of how to set up your Buy Now button, and I'll talk you though the most common options.

Next, we need to choose which payment button you'd like to use on your website. The default one is a very plain "Buy Now" button (it doesn't even mention PayPal), and although you can use your own button, I recommend you click on the link that says "Choose a different button" and then select the one that has the Visa and MasterCard logos on it (it's currently the second from left on the top row of buttons). Once you've selected your button, click the Continue button to return to the previous page.

The final item on this page is called Security Settings, and there is only one option here - Encrypt Your Payment Button.

Well, if you're selling an electronic product that will be available for download immediately after the customer has paid, not encrypting you payment button could mean that people could bypass PayPal completely and get to your download page without paying for the product. This is obviously not what you want, at all!

To demonstrate this, there are two PayPal buttons below. If you select the View Source option in your web browser, and scroll down until you see a line that begins "<form action", you will see what an unencrypted button looks like: you can see everything, including the price and the page to which you will be taken if you complete the payment process (i.e. http://www.allkindsofshiznit.com/downloads/getitnow.php?did=0310). If you visit this URL, you will see that the page works amd you can download the product without paying! There are ways around this, but they are outside the scope of this article.

However, if you scroll down to the next line that begins "<form action", you will see what an encrypted button looks like: all of the information you could see in the unencrypted button has now been replaced by a load of gobbledygook.

(By the way, both of those buttons do work, if you want to try them out. You will receive a great eBook and the cost to you will be absolutely zero!)

There are a few reasons why you might not want to encrypt your payment button, but, as we're keeping things simple, we'll leave the default option of Yes selected.

Although you can create your payment button at this stage, we're going to click the Add More Options button, as there are a few useful options on the next page that we're going to use.

As we're selling an electronically downloadable product in this example, we're going to ignore the Postage and VAT options.

The next section, Add Option Fields To Your Page, is not available as we've chosen to encrypt our payment button, so we can safely skip past this section.

We're also going to ignore the Customise Your Payment Pages section and go directly to the one labelled Customise Your Buyer's Experience.

Firstly, you should enter the full URL (i.e. including the http://) of the page you want your customer to be taken to after they have successfully paid for the product.

TIP: As we're keeping things simple and not making use of all of PayPal's features, you should make sure that this page does not have an obvious name, as people could simply guess the name and then download your product without paying for it. I tend to create a separate folder (or sub-directory) with a strange name, and put the download file in there (and I also don't call the page index.htm, or any of the other standard "home page" names).

You should leave the Payment Data Transfer option set to its default Off value, but you should enter something in the Cancel Payment URL option. This will be the page your customer is taken to should they cancel the payment process from within the PayPal website. Typically, you would enter the full URL of the sales page here, but you could take them to another page or even another site (e.g. where you might try to sell them something else, or tempt them with a free offer).

In the Miscellaneous section, if you're selling electronically downloadable items, you can leave the first question, about customers being able to buy more than one of the item, set to No.

You should also select the No Postage Needed option, as you won't be mailing anything to your customer.

In the next section, Collect Additional Information From Your Customer, you should leave this set to No. (As a general rule, you shouldn't collect any more information from your customer than is necessary to process their order. Many people find a request for additional information that does not appear to be relevant to their order to be intrusive, and you can lose sales because of this.)

The final information is the email address which you would like to use when receiving payments. You can add more than one email address (via the My Account / Profile option), and this field will default to your primary email address. However, you could add one that is more in keeping with your business or product (e.g. if you signed up for PayPal with a Hotmail address, you may be better using an email address that goes with your website, such as Sales@YourDomain.com). All available email addresses will be shown in the drop-down list, and you can simply select it from there.

The last thing you should do before creating your payment button is to click the Preview button. This will show you what your PayPal payment page will look like to customers, and it's worth checking it very carefully.

Once you're done here, click the Return button, scroll to the bottom of the page, and then click the Create Button Now button.

On the next page, there will be a text box in the middle of the screen, and you need to select all of the text in this box (it will start with "") and then copy it to the clipboard. (To select all of the text, you can click once somewhere in the box and then press the CTRL and A keys simultaneously.)

All you need to do now is to paste the contents of this text box into your web page, using whatever editor you prefer, and then upload it to your website.

If you look at the contents of this text box, you will note that a large part of it appears to be complete jibberish. This is because we selected the Encrypt Your Payment Button option, so here's another:

TIP: As your payment button details are largely encrypted (and therefore not readable), it is definitely worth making a note of the details you entered (e.g. price, successful payment page, and anything else) and storing this information for future use. If you ever want to change this button (e.g. increase the price, change the name), you'll be glad you have these details to hand, trust me!

Well, I hope that this proves useful to you - it sounds like a long and complex process, but once you get the hang of it, it only takes moments.

TIP: PayPal has a very aggressive policy of automatically logging you out of their site if you do not do anything for a few minutes (e.g. click a button). So, try to collate all of your information before you start the process of creating your payment button, and then be as quick as you can, as it's really irritating to have got part way through and then find that you've been logged out and have to log in again and re-enter all the information.

I've only scratched the surface here about the different tools that PayPal offers to Merchants (e.g. you can set up recurring subscriptions, free trial periods), so have a look around their site and, if you get stuck, their online Help system is pretty good.

Mark Farrar has been building websites since 1997, both for personal and business use, and is the co-founder and webmaster of www.WealthyTeddy.co.uk, incorporating www.AllKindsOfShiznit.com, amongst many others.