Putting payment buttons on your website

You probably won’t travel very far in the world of making websites before you need to accept some form of payment on your website.

However, when it comes to accepting other peoples’ money on your website you need to make sure that those payments are safe, secure and trustworthy and they’re not going to land you in trouble.

That inevitably leads to the need to get involved in website security issues and if you want to get a taste for how complicated and specialist a job that is, take a look at this overview from Wikipedia.

Most simple, small business sites will be perfectly happy with a simple, ‘off-the-shelf’ solution which takes away the pain of getting involved in security certificates and the like.

The best and most simple solution that I’ve found comes from Paypal.

If you haven’t already got a Paypal account, read all the info and get signed up now … there’s a reason they dominate the market in online payments and it has something to do with being a very good service.

Adding the buttons to your website

First get yourself a Paypal account

Next, you need to upgrade that to a business account. It doesn’t cost anything.

Once you’ve upgraded to a business account, head straight for the Merchant options.

With merchant options you can create:

- ‘Buy now’ buttons

- ‘Pay now’ buttons

- ‘Donate’ buttons

- Express checkouts

- Virtual payment terminals

… and being a member of Paypal means you can accept credit and debit cards, bank transfer and PayPal balance payments.

What’s more, because you’re dealing with a third party, they handle all the security issues for you, but they make the payment process leaving your website, then returning to your website afterwards, completely seamless.

How to do it

I’ve created a ‘Donate’ button as an example below.

‘Donate’ buttons are very popular on blogs like this one where an information service is provided for free and – if it’s useful – readers are asked to make a small contribution.

Click on the button below (don’t worry, you won’t be forced to make a contribution!) to see how it works:

You’ll see that as soon as you click on the button, you are taken away from my site directly to Paypal.

Note that the padlock and security confirmations appear immediately … the minute you’re with Paypal, the payment security measures begin.

You’ll also see that the payment page is customised with the name of my business webcumbria.co.uk, the reader can add as much or as little as they want in the payment box and, if you change your mind and decide not to donate, you can click on the ‘Return to webcumbria.co.uk’ link at the bottom of the page.

If you click on that link, you’re taken to a custom cancellation page which you can set when creating your button … but if you go ahead and make a donation, you’re taken to a thank you page, again which I was able to set up when creating the button.

If you decide to donate, you get an automatic Paypal receipt and the entire transaction is recorded in your Paypal account.

As the receiver of the donation, I get an automatic email notification that a payment has been made to my account (I’ve just tested it – my wife has donated 25p!), and Paypal automatically produces all the accounting data I’ll need at the end of the tax year.

Of course, Paypal takes a cut on each transaction – they are a business after all – but it’s a price I’m happy to pay as a small business making only occasional transactions and not requiring a specialist and (very expensive) customised solution.

Paypal can also bolt in securely to online stores like those made with Zen Cart so you can have an online cart to which a customer can add items, then Paypal acts as the checkout working seamlessly within your website.

Here’s what you need to do when creating your buttons:

1) Make sure you’ve created ‘Thanks for your payment’ and ‘Payment cancellation’ pages if you want to use these.

2) The novice user should use button encryption, the default setting.

3) At the end of the first page, select ‘Add more options’ rather than ‘Create button now’.

4) The novice user should opt for Paypal’s ‘Primary page style’.

5) Cut and paste your ‘Thanks for your payment’ and ‘Payment cancellation’ URLs into the ‘Customise your donor’s experience’ sections.

6) Now click on ‘Create button now’.

Once you do this, you’ll be directed to a great list of seemingly meaningless code (this just means the information is encrypted) which – if you cut and paste it onto your website, will create a payment button as in my example above.

As you get more ambitious with buttons you’ll be able to offer options in Euros and Pounds as well as creating custom fields for customers as well as even adding your website banner to payment pages.

By the way, one final thing … you can create, test and play with Paypal buttons as much as you want.

I thought they all got saved somewhere when I started using them, but they just create the code you need and the only time it’s ever saved is when you put it on your website.

What about you? What are your thoughts on this subject?