Creating a PayPal Buy Now button is a great way to monetize your existing website with very little cost; as a matter of fact, it is completely free. You only pay Paypal if you make any money. Paypal will take a small cut of the funds that they accept on your behalf.
This is one of the most practical alternatives compared to paying for a full shopping cart or ecommerce type of account with companies like…. ZenCart, for example.
To add a Paypal Buy Now or donation button to your website, here’s how:
Log in to your PayPal account. The My Account overview page will open by default as always.
- At the top of the page click on the Profile tab. The Profile Summary page will open next.
- On the right you will find the Selling Preferences heading – click the Create new button link. The Create PayPal payment button page will then open.
- Follow the instructions on the button creation wizard. At the end of the button creation wizard be sure to copy out the button code that Paypal has created for you.
- After that, open up a new notepad document and paste the HTML code that you copied from PayPal into it. Save the notepad document to your desktop. You can call it anything you like.
- Open your html editing program.
- Open up the page file that you want to put your new Buy Now button on, in HTML view.
- Copy the whole piece of Paypal code from the notepad file. There should be several lines of code.
- Paste the code you just copied into the html coding on the webpage you opened in your html editor. Be sure to paste the code near the bottom of the page. Look for a piece of code in your webpage that says </body>. This is the very end of your webpage; the part that you and your customers can see anyway. Paste the code right before the </body> tag.
- Now when you switch your HTML editor back in design view you should be able to see your webpage again. It should look similar now to how it looks when you visit your site on the internet.
- You should be able to see the whole page; except for the fact that now, there is a PayPal button at the bottom of the page. Now you can highlight the Buy Now button and move it around the page like you would for any other picture on your site.
You now have a functional way to receive payments in Paypal.