Microsoft Office

From the Microsoft Small Business Office Onlne weblog:

Before you begin
You will need to register for a free PayPal Business Account. If you already have a PayPal personal account, it is easy to upgrade to the business account. Inside the PayPal Business Account, there is a section called Merchant Services. I encourage you to sniff around this portion of the site, because along with the Create Buttons feature, PayPal offers a lot of free and useful e-commerce tools to keep your business running smoothly.

Create a PayPal payment button
PayPal offers not just one, but 5 payment button choices. This is fantastic because you can select a button that is a perfect match for your site’s needs. The buttons to choose from are:

Add to Cart — Use it to sell multiples and variations of an item; it includes inventory tracking.

Buy Now — Designed for single purchases and/or the one-at-a-time customer.

Donate — Similar to the “buy now” single purchase button, but meant for donations.

Buy Gift Certificate — A single-purchase button that allows you to sell gift certificates in amounts you specify.

Subscribe — Great for reoccurring payments like membership dues or subscription fees.

So you can see that the benefits of PayPal buttons are not limited to only e-tailers with products to sell. Take your time deciding which button best suits your site. Be sure to factor in the goals you want to accomplish.

Next, sign in to your Office Live Small Business account. You will need to navigate to your site’s Page Manager and then select the page in which you want to embed the payment button. You can also insert the same payment button site-wide if you want to have a button that acts more like a permanent reminder or as a means of highlighting a special offer.

In Page Editor, click in the location that you want your PayPal button to appear. Then, under Module, click PayPal. A dialogue box opens and prompts you to log in to your PayPal Business account. After you have logged in, click Merchant Services. This is the section I mentioned earlier that has all the cool e-commerce tools, including the button creator.

Choose the type of button you want to work with, such as Buy Gift Certificate or Subscribe. Add the button ID information, customize its appearance, and then, depending on the type of button, you can set up your own detailed billing data such as pricing, shipping amount, tax rate, currency options, etc.

Copy and paste. When you have finished setting up the parameters for your PayPal payment button, click Create Button, and you are directed to a page where you copy a small amount of HTML code and paste the code into the open PayPal Module dialogue box inside your Page Editor. Then click OK. It sounds a bit tricky, but all you are doing is copying HTML code from the PayPal site and pasting it into your site’s PayPal Module. Then click OK to confirm the changes.

Drag and drop. You are now ready to position your button inside your site’s page layout by dragging and dropping the button module. Once you have finalized the placement of your button, you can insert the button on different pages. You will need to select and copy the button module, pick a page from the Web pages drop-down list, and paste the module into the new page. This is nice because you don’t have to build new buttons for each page–you can use the same one.