Welcome to Shaun Luttin's public notebook. It contains rough, practical notes. The guiding idea is that, despite what marketing tells us, there are no experts at anything. Sharing our half-baked ideas helps everyone. We're all just muddling thru. Find out more about our work at bigfont.ca.

Getting Started with PayPal

Tags: billing, paypal, e-commerce

We want to start letting our customers make payments with credit and debit cards.

PayPal offers a Standard plan, which has only a per transaction change. This is a good fit for us, because we will be processing only a handful of payments.

  • 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction.
  • Credit Cards
  • PayPal

Steps

  • Go to https://www.paypal.com/ca/webapps/mpp/paypal-payments-standard
  • Choose Get Started for Free, then
    • Create New Account, this lets me keep work separate from life. Be sure to use a separate email address from my life email address.
    • Login, do this if I want to use an existing account.
  • Confirm your email.
  • Go to My Account > Overview > My Business Setup > Start Now
    • Ignore this step.
    • I received a 404. Tech support said I can skip this step for the Standard package.
  • Link and confirm bank account (takes 3-5 days.)
  • Go to Merchant Services > Create Button
    • Create Button, adds a button to the Website; always accepts Credit Card and PayPal.
    • Send Invoice, send an invoice by email.
    • Express Checkout API,
      • this is just another way to checkout;
      • the only advantage over the button is that,
      • while the button lets us accepts both Credit Card and PayPal,
      • the API can allow us to accept either PayPal, Credit Card, or both.
      • If we want only to accept PayPal and not credit cards, then this is the way to go.
    • Note, Integrating PayPal more deeply with our site (i.e. never leaving the bigfont.ca URL) requires PayPal Pro, which is $35/month for Canada.