Creating a Business Account with paypal is free. When you first sign up for an account you will need to wait for a confirmation payment to be received into one of your offline bank accounts first to make sure you are a real person with a real bank account.

Once that has happened you can then start using paypal for your online business to process payments. It is a secure payment system and well known world wide, so people will recognise it which is good as it gives your customers peace of mind that their payments will be secure.

Make sure that you have set up a merchant account – you will need:

• Your business name (it can be your own name or website name)
• An email address for confirmation of your account

Once you have confirmed your merchant business account you can log in and go to your Business set up page.

Creating Paypal Buttons For Your Website

• Log in and click on My Business Setup
• Click on Create Payment Buttons For My Website

• Click ‘Create A Buy Now Button’

Step 1

• Fill in the following blanks:

a) choose button type (you can choose ‘go to my saved buttons’ once you already have some that you have created. This is handy if you want to keep all the options the same).

b) Item Name (give it an ID)

c) Price (make sure you have the correct currency – $USA is the most popular choice). If you are in UK make sure you set up your paypal account to accept dollar payments or it won’t work!

d) choose a button style (I would stick with the well known paypal button)

e) choose your Merchant account for payment (this should be your business account name rather than private one)

Step 2

• Save your button so that you can use it again and keep your preferences
• Since I sell digital products I don’t fill anything else in as I don’t have “stock”

Step 3

The only things you really need to fill in here are:

a) Take customers to this URL when they cancel their checkout

It is a good idea to add a url here for any cancelled payments. You could send them to your blog, a free offer page, a different but related offer, etc.

b) Take customers to this URL when they finish checkout

Once someone has made their payment you can send them to your download page or your opt in page.

Create Button

Now click on create button and you will be given some code to add to your website. This is html code so make sure that you add it to your website in html mode – if you are using wordpress for example you will need to be in text mode not visual.

Test Your Payment Process

Once added to your website I suggest you check to make sure it works OK. Click on your payment button and make sure that you are directed to a secure paypal payment page for the correct amount.