PayPal makes accepting payments quite easy. We will show you several ways to add a PayPal payment button to the posts, pages or sidebar of your WordPress blog.  Once you see the steps, you will see that they are not hard - but it will also highlight the value of plugins that can handle this for you.

Before you get started, you will need a PayPal premier or business account.  The basic PayPal account will not support this function.

Instructions for Manually Adding PayPal

1. Login to your PayPal account
2. Select Merchant Services
3. Select Donations
4. Enter Name - Blog name, your name or your organization’s name. This text will display to your potential donors.
5. Select customization options for the PayPal button: logo size, display credit cards (Yes/No), default button or your own button image, currency type; fixed dollar amount of user supplied amount.  You will also have advanced customization options to control the text that is displayed during the donation process
6. Click on the Create Button
7. You will see a Web version and an Email version.  You will choose the non-obvious selection and use the code in the email tab (though, not quite yet)
8. Now open another browser tab or window and login to your WordPress blog
9. Open up a new or existing page or post
10. Switch to the HTML tab, not the visual editor
11. Head to the WordPress.com support page
12. Pick the button you like and copy the code as in
    <img src=“https://www.paypal.com/en_US/i/btn/btn_donate_LG.gif” alt=“” />
    
13. Paste in the code you just copied from the WordPress support page
14. Switch to the Visual Editor tab
15. Now return to the browser window or tab with PayPal page
16. Copy the code from the email tab
17. Now return to WordPress
18. Select the image and insert the code you just copied into the Link URL and click Insert
19. Save your page or post and you now have a PayPal donation button on your site

You can copy the HTML code from that page or post into a Text Widget or any other page or post - you don’t need to repeat the whole process again.

Plugins for Adding PayPal

WP Easy Paypal Payment Accept -Easy to use WordPress plugin to accept PayPal payment for a service or product or donation in multiple currencies in one click. Can be used in the sidebar, posts and pages.

WordPress PayPal Donation Plugin- The WordPress PayPal Donations Plugin allows you to create a donations page or post where your readers can donate any amount they wish. Features include:

• Specify the number of donations and/or links to show
• Specify an expiry date whereby donations older than this date will not be shown
• Offer the ability to supply a link back to their own site if the user donates more than a specified amount
• Show a graph bar showing how much has been donated towards your supplied target figure
• Multiple currencies supported

EasyDonation -EasyDonation allows WordPress users to easily embed a PayPal donation button with one tag.

PayPal is just the start of ecommerce

Now - you just wait for your donations and hopefully you won’t have too wait too long!  If you plan to start selling products and services, you can still use the PayPal code you setup - but there are more robust ecommerce systems like Magento, osCommerce and Zen Cart that can help you to fuel a full Internet store.

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