Accepting Payments using PayPal

You can accept payments on your website using PayPal.

Some of the features that make PayPal an easy way to accept payments are:

• you don’t need to have a merchant account with a Bank
• customers can pay with Visa/Mastercard without joining as PayPal members
• you can use Buy Now buttons to accept one off payments, Subscribe buttons to accept recurring payments and a Shopping Cart to allow customers to add multiple items to their cart and then check out.
• whenever a payment is made, you receive email notification.
• you can set shipping costs in your PayPal account.

Be Informed

This page summarises how things work - please refer to your country specific PayPal site for exact details as they apply to you. Before deciding to use PayPal (or any online payment system), you should inform yourself as to how it works and issues associated with online payments. For example, customers can dispute payments and request refunds, even after you have shipped goods.

PayPal lets you accept payments in several ways. Three of them are available to use on your OM4 website, and you need to learn how they work. You should review the information on the PayPal site under Merchant Services to learn about them:

• PayPal Shopping Cart: customers click an Add to Cart button to add items to their cart, and then use a View Cart button to change quantities and check out. Example of an OM4 site with PayPal Shopping Cart.
  
• BuyNow buttons: customers click on a Buy Now button to pay a one off payment for a specific item. Example of an OM4 site with BuyNow buttons.
• Subscriptions and Recurring Payments: customers click on a Subscribe button to setup a recurring set of payments, for example 12 monthly payments of $300. Customers must create a PayPal account to pay in this way. Example of Subscription buttons on OM4Tourism.com

Costs

A PayPal account doesn’t cost anything to setup - for basic PayPal usage you pay between 3.5% and 4% commission on sales to PayPal.

You can use PayPal on an OM4 Community website.

How to Setup and Use PayPal on your site.

Register with PayPal

Register your own Business Account with PayPal first, and link it to your bank account. This will allow you to accept money to your PayPal account and then transfer it to your bank account.

Prepare Your Web Page

Create one or more Pages using Dashboard, Write, Page.

Create placeholders where you PayPal buttons will go. For example, include [BuyNow Button $100]

You may want to use HTML tables to layout products and services for sale, but you don’t have to. Set aside a few hours if you want to learn how to create HTML tables, and work on some practice pages first. You will need to use the Code/HTML view when creating your web page to do this.

Prepare Payment Confirmed and Payment Cancelled Pages

After customers successfully pay you they are returned to the Successful Payment URL - this shoudl be a page on your website. Create a page for this purpose thanking them for purchasing from you, and providing any post-sale information that is required (for example, what to expect next).

If customers get part way through a PayPal payment but cancel, they are returned to the Cancel Payment URL - this should also be a page on your website. Create a page for this purpose as well.

We recommend you create a page called Administration, and create your Payment Confirmed and Payment Cancelled pages with the Adminstration page as the parent. By keeping these pages separate, you can easily keep them out of the menus (if you are using automatic menus), and also add an entry to the Robots.txt file to stop the Administration page (and therefore all of its sub pages) from being indexed.

Prepare Buttons

Use the button generators in your PayPal account to create the buttons you want to use. Do a few practice runs with these to get the hang of them, and be prepared to read the instructions.

We create our buttons as non encrypted buttons, as it means we have control over more options. If you do use non encrypted buttons, consider that an expert user could potentially change the button values before submitting a payment. If you were selling diamond rings and automatically shipping once a successful payment was received, this would be a problem. If you are only shipping after checking the payment first, then this is potentially not an issue.

When you have created your buttons, copy the button text into a Word document or text document.

Create Buttons

If you have have a standalone OM4 website, you can copy and paste your button text directly into your web pages, replacing the placeholders you have created.

If you have an OM4 Community website:

• put all your button text into a text document and label each button clearly with the URL on your website and the placeholder for each button.
• send your button text to OM4 using the Contact Us facility on the OM4 website.

OM4 will upload your buttons for you. There is no charge for this service.

Pasting your Own PayPal Button Text

If you do get your own PayPal button text and paste it into your OM4 Community site, a number of critical functions are automatically stripped from the button text. This means it will not work.

Sensitive functions - such as Javascript and form declarations - are stripped to prevent a malicious user obtaining access to an OM4 Community site, and then attempting to paste malicious code to try and bring down the community.

We plan on providing a facility to allow you to enter your own PayPal buttons on your OM4 Community site without having to be able to paste Javascript.

Code is not stripped from a standalone site, so you can paste PayPal buttons in standalone sites to your heart’s content.