Create an Add to Cart Button in Paypal

PayPal’s shopping cart makes it easy for website owners to process payments for multiple products.

Other shopping carts like 1ShoppingCart, ZenCart and so on require a different payment processor on the back-end, usually with a merchant account tied to a gateway like Authorize.net. That makes the setup process cumbersome and time consuming, sometimes taking months if you don’t already have a merchant account and gateway setup.

PayPal on the other hand, integrates the shopping cart software automatically with its payment processing, so all you need to do is create the buy buttons for your products and you’re up and running.

With PayPal’s shopping cart system, users can add multiple products to their shopping cart and see their products, taxes, shipping and totals before checking out. They can add as many products as they want and just go through the payment process once, making it easy to sell multiple products at once.

Here’s how to add an Add to Cart button to your website.

Step 1: Click on Merchant Services

Access your billing tools by going to Merchant Services.

Step 2: Click on Add to Cart Button

Along the top of the merchant services page is a row of 4 buttons. Click on the Add to Cart Button logo to start the button creation process.

Step 3: Select Item Name and Price

Give your item a descriptive name. This is the label for the product that your users will see on their shopping cart before they checkout.

The item number is strictly for internal purposes. It makes shipping and handling a lot easier if you’re processing many orders. It’s a lot easier to tell an employee to ship “Item #174” than to ship “A pair of size 8 black Nike sneakers with white laces.”

The item number will be reported to you every time the item is sold. If you run a virtual business or your sales volume isn’t high enough that fulfillment is an issue yet, then you can safely just leave this field blank.

Finally, fill in the price of the item.

Step 4: Customize Your Button

PayPal offers many options for how your button can be customized.

First of all, you can customize your button with a drop-down price menu. Use this option if you have items with multiple price options. If you do use this drop-down menu, leave the Price field in Step 3 blank.

You can also add a drop-down menu for different product choices. For example, if you have an item in multiple colors, you can add a drop down menu with their color choices.

You can also add any miscellaneous pieces of text you want above the button.

Finally, you can use your own image if you want to instead of using PayPal’s default add to cart button.

Step 5: Specify Shipping and Taxes

Specify the shipping rates and tax rates for this item.

Step 6: Apply Advanced Options (Optional)

PayPal offers many advanced options that you can use to customize how your button and shopping cart interacts with your customers.

Click on “Step 3: Customize Advanced Features” to change some of these advanced options.

Among these options include:

• The ability for users to send you a special note about their order.
• The ability to specify where users go after completing the checkout process.
• The ability to use PayPal to pass variables to custom tracking software.

The ability to have PayPal track your inventory.

Step 7: Click Create Button and Upload Code

Once you’ve finished with all the options, click Create Button to get the HTML code for the button.

Copy and upload the code generated by PayPal to your website.

Repeat this process with each product that you’re selling.

Users will then be able to add products to their cart and choose to either keep shopping or checkout. They can add as many items to their cart as they want and go through the checkout process once they’re ready to pay.

Congratulations! You’ve setup your PayPal add to cart button and are now able to use PayPal to accept payments for one or more product at once.