How to Create a "Buy Now" Button Using Your Paypal Account

For those wishing to sell electronic products from their website without a shopping cart, it's easy to do. All you'll need is a Paypal account. Paypal has a wonderful system set up where you can set up a "Buy Now" or similar worded button and then place that button on your website. Someone purchasing your product doesn’t even have to have a Paypal account themselves. They can just click on the button and it will take them to a page where they can use their credit card or debit card to pay you and then Paypal will direct the person to the website address where they can download your product.

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

Instructions

1. If you don’t already have a Paypal account, sign up for one. A Premier account is best if you are planning on using it for business purposes. It is free to sign up.

2. Sign in to your Paypal account and select "Merchant Services" from the menu across the top.

3. Select the "Buy Now" button from the "Tools for Existing Paypal Merchants."

4. This will take you to a form that you can fill in with the information about your electronic product. The first field you can put the name of your product. Skip the "Item ID/Number" field unless you also give your products a number. Fill out the rest of the information as necessary.

5. Choose what style of "Buy Now" button you would like or create your own button.

6. Choose whether or not you want the button to be encrypted. If you choose encrypted, this will prevent someone from hacking into your website and changing the price or the account the money is going into.

7. The next section is "Shipping" but this will not be an issue if you are selling an electronic product, so you can skip this section.

8. Select "Add More Options." This will take you to a page that has several options, but since we are talking about electronic products, you should look at the section that has "Customize your buyer’s experience." This will give you an opportunity to put the web page address for the download of your product so that when someone pays for your product Paypal will automatically send them to your download page, thus saving you time and energy.

9. Select "Create Button" and this will take you to the html code for the button. Just add it to your website and now anyone can click on it to purchase your electronic product.

Tips & Warnings

• Don't have a page on your website where customers who cancel their payment are sent to. The idea is that you don’t want to encourage buyers to change their mind and cancel the payment.
• Unless you know your buyers will be purchasing with some other currency other than U.S. dollars, that you leave the currency at U.S. dollars and your buyer’s country at United States for the same reason.
• Keep in mind that while this tutorial covers selling an electronic product, Paypal does make it possible for you to sell non-virtual products as well. They even give you a way to calculate shipping so you would want to go this route and then once the customer has paid, ship their product to them. Paypal should redirect them to a page that essentially says, "Thank you for ordering. Your product will be shipped in x amount of days." It's a good idea as well in this case.
• If you are selling an Internet marketing product of any kind and are about to start an advertising campaign, it is a good idea to e-mail Paypal customer service and let them know ahead of time. If you don’t and they see that a lot of money is suddenly being deposited into your account, they may put your account on limited access, which can be difficult to get out of. It’s always best to inform them ahead of time.
• If you make a lot of sales, don't suddenly withdraw a large amount from your Paypal account. Paypal assumes there is a problem and that maybe someone has illegally accessed your account or that you are running a scam. This is a good way to get your account put on limited access.

Resources

• Paypal