While the Internet revolution has had many positive effects on society, easily the greatest outcome has been the emergence of seamless e-commerce. If you’d like to accept payments through your website, PayPal is one of the best options available. The best part is that there are multiple ways to add PayPay functionality to a site with little fuss. The following PayPal integration blueprint should prove to be quite helpful to any webmaster.

Generate the Payment Button Code

There are three basic types of PayPal payment button that can be installed: Buy Now and Donations, Shopping Cart or Subscriptions and Recurring Payments. You’ll need a Business or Premier account to actually receive any money. Go to the official PayPal website and click on the type of button you’d like to install. Choose your preferred option and generate the necessary HTML code to install on your own website.

Add the Code to Your Web Pages

Putting your buttons or widgets to work is child’s play. Simply paste the HTML code that you’ve copied from PayPal to the pages where you want your buttons to reside. As an example, you could create a “Donate” form on WordPress by simply creating a new static Page and slapping the button code into the body using the back-end text editor. Once you’ve positioned your buttons properly, you can worry about things like customization.

Add PayPal to a Shopping Cart

To use PayPal with a dedicated shopping cart, there are several options. If you want to create a basic PayPal Shopping Cart, it’s simply a matter of generating the right button code as outlined above. To add PayPal functionality to a third-party cart, you can either script the necessary code yourself or use a plugin if you have an e-commerce CMS such as Magento or Shopify.

Customize Payment Buttons

You may want to customize your various “Donate” and “Add to Cart” buttons for the sake of clarity or to better suit your site’s layout. PayPal Developer tutorials are the go-to resource for technical information in this regard. To get started, find the “Create PayPal Payment Button” page under “Merchant Services” within your PayPal dashboard. From here, you’ll be able to tweak button images, item names and dollar amounts.

Take Advantage of Advanced Features

Though the basic functionality of PayPal’s payment buttons are good enough for most webmasters, there are plenty of extra capabilities worth exploring. For instance, one could enable multi-user access to their PayPal account for ease of administration. In addition, PayPal offers users the ability to access tons of reporting tools and Monthly Account Statements. Last but not least, there’s PayPal’s Instant Payment Notification service for real-time updates on financial transactions.

PayPal Integration Done Right

As you can clearly see, bolting on PayPal functionality to an existing site is a fairly easy process. When in doubt, refer to the PayPal Developer center for more specific details regarding what’s possible insofar as accepting payments is concerned. No matter how you choose to add PayPal buttons to your site, you’ll find that they’re one of the easiest ways to process financial transactions on the web.