PayPal - Create Buy Now or Shopping Cart Buttons
Once you’ve established your account you can create your online store. You can either create a simple Buy Now Button for single item websites, or you can use Add To Cart Buttons to create a shopping cart for selling multiple items. In this tutorial we'll show how to create an Add To Cart Button - the process for creating Buy Now Buttons is very similar.

Login in to your PayPal account. Choose Merchant Account.

The form appears for creating your button. 

Item Name:

Item name and Price are required. The other fields are optional.

Shipping Options:

If you're shipping for a flat rate, enter the amount.  If you want to set the shipping preferences, first finish creating your button - you can create or edit shipping preferences at any time.  For help, please view our tutorial on Shipping and Sales Tax Options.

Sales Tax Options:

Either set a flat rate amount, or come back later to set the Sales Tax Options. For help, please view our tutorial on Shipping and Sales Tax Options.

Click on Add More Options at the bottom of the page.

The option field is used if peferences such as size or color options are needed.

Choose a button size.

Customizing payment page is an advanced function and not required for your button to function.

Customize Your Buyer's Experience.

After a customer uses paypal, you can send them to a website page.  Typically you might want to send them to the home page of your website, http://www.domainname.com.  You can also create a special thank you page to send them to - just add the page name to this section.

Note:  If you're selling electronic downloads, use the Successful Payment field to direct customers to the page where they can download the electronic content.

Shipping Preferences:

For books, select Yes, Require Shipping.  For ebooks and electronic downloads, select No Shipping Needed.

Customer Note:

If you want your customers to be able to write you a note, check YES, and edit the Note Title to read "Comments Welcome" or another title.

Finally, choose which email address you want sale notifications sent to.

Create Button Now:

When you're ready, click Create Button Now.

HTML Code:

Paypal now provides you with your button code.  Click on Select All underneath the Add to Cart code.  If you want to display a View Cart button, come back to this page after you've added your Add to Cart button and repeat the process for the View Cart button. This adds the code to your clipboard.

In the next tutorial we'll show how to add this code to your webpage so you can begin taking online orders.