PayPal Buttons and Testing Payments

It's taken a bit more than the 'few days' I thought it would to update my Blog but I guess that's the nature of this work. As planned I've investigated using PayPal as a payment mechanism for my online business. There's so much to read but when I got started it wasn't so bad.

I've started a new part of the BiziLizi website for the extra things I'll need to be able to do for my online business and that includes a page on how to set up a PayPal business account and add some simple buttons to a website. There are some buttons on my PayPal page that you can use. They are actually connected to my PayPal business account and will accept payments. I've even created a 'Donate' button for anyone to use if they're finding the site helpful or just want to give me a bit of financial encouragement. It would be absolutely great if I were to receive some donations.

I've also learnt about and put into practice a tool that PayPal provides to help test the whole PayPal purchasing process. It lets you set up test accounts for buyers and sellers. You can create buttons, add these to a website and simulate transactions without any money actually changing hands. You can also see the emails that are created for both buyers and sellers. This tool is called Sandbox and I have added a page to the BiziLizi website that explains how to set it up and how to create buttons. It all looked a bit daunting at first but made sense after spending some time on it.

Having created some PayPal hosted buttons, my next move is to look at what's involved with non-hosted buttons. Apparently this is the sort I will need to use with the software I have decided to use to secure links to the digital downloads of my 'Writing books for children' course.

My next post to this Blog will look at how I use this software with PayPal to create my own shopping cart and link this to providing customers with digital downloads.

It will definitely be more than a 'few days' before I figure out how to do all of this and can update this Blog. But until then, please keep checking my BiziLizi website for updates.

BiziLizi