Online Store : Working With Paypal

Talking about shopping cart and online payment is an endless story. Just lately I read an article that discussed various ways to deal with Paypal on your Wordpress-engined website. Here is the review of the article.

What is Paypal?

Paypal is a online payment processor that acts as a middleman between you and your customer credit-cards. Using Paypal means that you need not to worry about your credit-card details to be spread around the Internet. This means that you can accept payment in a more secure manner than using traditional credit-card’s payment options.

When you work with Paypal, there is a small amount of fees that cut from the payment you get. The cut is varying depend on the service that you choose from Paypal and the location of your transaction. However, there are no setup or monthly fees for Paypal service.

Integrating Paypal to your online store is a good option because this way you grant a secure way in the transaction for your customers. This way your customer will have more trust to your store.

Taking Payments

If your site is selling services, or you are encouraging your customers to donate for some free goods on your store, then you need to consider on putting a Paypal button on your site. Paypal allows you to create a donation button in the same way you would create a fixed price button.

There is a technical manual on configuring your buttons manually, or you can go to the button factory inside of your Paypal account and step through the process  from =my account->profile -> my saved buttons. Simply  suggest that your readers may like to give you a tip with a big button and see what happens.

A neater way to do this is with the plugin Buy me a beer it integrates with your paypal account and places a call to action at the bottom of each post suggesting a reader should leave a tip if they enjoyed the content.

Paid Subscription Sites

If you run a website that support for paid subscriptions, then you need to consider of using Paypal as a payment alternative. Paypal subscription service will take regular payments automatically until your customer cancels the payment.

There are some plugins for Wordpress that support this service. Some of them are Your Members and WP-Member.  Both are premium plug-ins that will cut a little from the payments.

Shopping Cart

Shopping cart is the easiest way to sell your physical or online products such as e-book or plug-ins. This way, your customer can select more item to be bought later. This way you give the simplicity to your online store as customers only need to pay at the end of their shopping time.

We already discuss on how to use WP e-Commerce plug-in for this need, but there are more plugins that focus on using Paypal as payment method. One of them is Wordpress Easy Paypal Payment Or Donation Accept Plugin. Go to the site for detailed installation and configuration for the plug-in.

That’s all for Paypal as a payment method for your online store. Hopefully, you’ll get ideas on integrating Paypal on your online store as an easy way to serve your customers.