Ben McCormack

I’ve been playing around with PayPal to try to learn ways that people can send other people money over the internet.  For my own personal projects, I have zero interest in learning credit card handling myself, so PayPal makes it easy enough to transfer money from one individual to another (albeit for a small fee).

PayPal has several fairly customizable options for giving users an opportunity to send money on a web site.  Even with their simple “button” feature, I was surprised at how much customization you could do.  You can easily create buttons to “Buy Now,” “Subscribe,” “Donate,” and even “Add to Cart.”  Some of the buttons even allow you to specify purchasing options for an item.  For example, you could have a button with “Small,” “Medium,” and “Large,” with each option having a separate checkout price.

To try it out, I decided to make a custom button for my website.  I chose the “Donation” button, which allows the buyer to specify the amount of money they wish to send to me.  I didn’t really want to use the word “Donate,” so I copied their default Donate button into Paint.NET and edited out “Donate” and added “Pay Me!”

I also added a custom header to the checkout page so it (somewhat) matches my blog theme.  However, because the image is hosted in a non-https domain, users may see an error that some of the content being loaded did not come from a secure source.  I’ll live.

Collecting money via PayPal is super easy.  If you want to see the fruits of my labors, check out the “Pay Me!” section of my website.