Making PayPal work with website

When you setup your PayPal account, there are certain profile settings that need to be altered in order for your online customers to buy your products or services in the way you expect.

Accepting Credit Cards

For a start, make sure your account accepts credit cards (assuming you want to accept credit cards). When you sign up, you'll be offered the following choice:

Personal Account
Ideal for online shopping. Send and receive payments through PayPal's secure network. Personal accounts cannot accept debit or credit card payments.

Premier Account
Perfect for buying and selling on eBay or merchant websites. Accept all payment types for low fees. Do business under your own name.

Business Account
The right choice for your online business. Accept all payment types for low fees. Do business under a company or group name.

Note that the Personal Account does not accept credit cards while the Premier and Business Accounts do. Most of our clients select a Business Account and do business under their company name. All three accounts are free, but PayPal's commission-per-transaction rates vary.

Shipping

The default setting for your shipping costs is $0.00. You can adjust this within your account as you want, or make use of the "sliding scale" shipping – but it's of limited use and isn't much good if you want different flat shipping rates for different items. Besides, many of our clients don't want to get too involved in the nitty-gritty technical details. The best method all round is for the webmaster to add individual shipping values to each item within the code of the webpage. But in order for this to work, the website shipping values must be able to override the account values. You (the PayPal account holder) can enable this very easily:

1. Login to your PayPal account.
2. Click the Profile tab.
3. Under Selling Preferences, click Shipping Calculations.
4. At the bottom of the Shipping Calculations page, check the box that says "Click here to allow transaction-based shipping values to override the profile shipping settings listed above (if profile settings are enabled)."
5. Click the "Save" button.

Once that's done, the webmaster can have full control of the shipping rates, and all the client needs to do is provide a list of rates to use for each item/service.

Return Page

The Return Page is the page that your customers end up on after buying something from your website. Your customers go through PayPal's secure checkout and then, by default, go to the PayPal "thank you" page. But it might be better if customers ended up back on your site so you can deliver a more personal, relevant message.

The webmaster can add a simple line of code to each "buy now" button that tells PayPal where to send the customer after the payment process is finished. But for this to work, the webpage must be able to override the default account setting. You (the PayPal account holder) can enable this very easily:

1. Login to your PayPal account.
2. Click the Profile tab.
3. Under Selling Preferences, click Website Payment Preferences.
4. At the top of the Website Payment Preferences page, enable Auto Return (click ON).
5. Click the "Save" button at the foot of the page.

Once that's done, the webmaster can send the customer to whichever page you like on your site, even different pages depending on the "buy now" button. For instance, if someone buys your book entitled "How to Make Money," the thank you message might say, "Thanks for buying my book on how to make money – hopefully you'll be a millionaire by this time next year!" And for another product you can deliver an equally personal and relevant message.

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