Placing an order form on your website using PayPal
If you are using PayPal, this article will help you add a “Buy Now” button for people to buy your product or service.
Before we begin
- Let me remind you that PayPal is not the only third party merchant out there. A list of a bunch of others can be found in the article, How to Accept Credit Cards on Your Website.
- If you have a personal PayPal account, you will need to upgrade to a Business or Premier account. Both allow you to accept unlimited credit card payments. It is free to sign up, but there is a transaction charge.
If you don’t know what a third party merchant is, you can also find that in the How to Accept Credit Cards on Your Website article.
Creating a Buy Now button tutorial
Keep in mind that things might have changed since the time of this article, so you will want to double check yourself just in case something is different.
- Log into your PayPal account.
- Click “Merchant Services” in a blue tab towards the top of the page.
- On the new page, find the link that says “Buy Now Buttons” in the “PayPal Website Payments Standard” section.
- That takes you to a page called “Create a PayPal payment button.”
- A drop down box will appear called “Accept payments for.” Depending on what you are selling, select either “Products,” “Services,” or “Subscriptions and recurring billing”. I only have information on Products and Services, so you will need to check with PayPal for information on Subscriptions.
- You now need to answer the question, “Do you want your customers to buy multiple products before they check out.” In this situation, choose the ‘No; create a “Buy Now” button’ option. This will take customers straight to the payment page.
- Enter the “Item name” in the field provided. Make sure to use a clear and logical name in this field so people know exactly what the item is that they are buying.
- Set the price in the “Price” field. Change the “Currency” field if necessary.
- If you have to charge for shipping and taxes, PayPal does not calculate that figure and you will need to figure it out on your own. Enter that number in the appropriate fields.
- In the “Merchant ID for purchase transactions” area, you probably want to leave the default of “Secure merchant account ID.”
- In the section named “Step 2: Track inventory, profit and loss (optional),” you can click that header to expand the section to see if you want to customize anything, or just keep the defaults.
- As with the previous step, in the section named “Step 3: Customize advanced features (optional),” you can click that header to expand the section to see if you want to customize anything, or just keep the defaults.
Below are instructions for other customizations you can do:
- In the section, “Do you want to let your customer change order quantities,” if you want to allow your customers to order more than 1 unit at a time, select “Yes”. Otherwise, select “No.”
- To allow your customers to be add “special instructions” to their order, select “Yes.” Otherwise click “No.”
- If you want your customer’s postal address, select “Yes.” Otherwise select “No.”
- If you want to customize the message in the landing pages for a successful order or a cancellation, you can do so in the next two fields, “Take customer to a specific page (URL) after checkout cancellation” and “Take customer to a specific page (URL) after successful checkout.”
13. When you are satisfied with your choices, click the “Create Button” button.
14. A new page giving you the generated HTML code appears. Select the code, right-click, and choose “Copy” from the menu that appears.
You will need to paste that code into the correct spot on your web page using a method appropriate to your web editor. How to do this will be different for each type of web editor. I will add a section on how to do this using Dreamweaver and WordPress shortly. If you want help in the meantime, feel free to contact me.
Conclusion
Congratulations! You now have a “Buy Now” button with an order form. Now you should be all set to start making money using PayPal.
on April 6, 2010 at 1:56 am
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how can i make the button send me an email, notifying me of what was ordered, so that i can ship the order appropriately? Or is there a setting for that on paypal? I am building my first store online, selling tshirts etc. I have built other sites but never the store portion. Thanks for any help
on April 20, 2010 at 8:34 am
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Hey Matt,
Sorry for taking so long to respond. I just got a new job and barely have time to breathe anymore.
You should be able to get email notifications by first logging in to your PayPal account. Then move your mouse over the “Profile” link at the top of the page on the second row. In the dropdown choices that appear, click “More Options”. In the page that appears, in the Account Information section click on the “Notifications” link. From there you can check the notifications you want to receive. Hope that helps.