You can easily add a PayPal shopping cart to your WordPress ecommerce website and kick-start your online business. While there are plenty of other ways to sell products and services, many users will want to be able to quickly buy items via PayPal.
Using full-featured shopping carts for simple PayPal functionality may sometimes be excessive. Here are two simple ways to make your WordPress-based site PayPal friendly.
1. Install the Simple PayPal Shopping Cart Plugin
First, go to your Dashboard and navigate to the Plugins tab. Select ‘Add New’ from the menu that pops up. A search page will come up where you should type ‘simple paypal shopping cart’ in the search bar.
When the plugin shows up in the search results, click on the ‘Install Now’ option. This will bring up a confirmation window. On the next screen, you will be able to activate the plugin. When it has been activated, you can visit the Plugins tab from your Dashboard to configure. Hover your cursor on Settings in the menu and go to WP Shopping Cart to be taken to a form.
Fill the form with relevant information, such as your PayPal email address, a name for your shopping cart, currency etc. Now you’re ready to add a product. Head to Posts → Add New. Create a product page, input the information you want such as product description and price etc. To enable the ‘Add to Cart’ option, insert the following code where you want the option with the relevant tags and values:
[wp_cart: Product Name: price: 39.99: end]
Now you can save the post or publish. Next, you can add the widget that will show the shopping cart contents on the side bar. To do this, go to your Dashboard → Appearance → Widgets. Drag the widget for WP Shopping Cart to your sidebar and select ‘Save’. That’s all there is to it!
This process, however, could be a little tricky for those who are new to WordPress. An alternative is to use another plugin – the UI for WordPress Simple PayPal Shopping Cart – to have a button on your WordPress editor that will generate a shortcode for you. This means you won’t have to type in the code for each product you are selling.
2. Create a Buy Button
Another alternative is to get the button code from the PayPal website and slip it into your WordPress HTML tab. To do this, log into your PayPal account and go to the Merchant Services tab. You’ll find it at the top of your homepage. Click on the image that says ‘Create payment button’. Follow instructions to configure and save your button based on your business needs. Then simply copy the HTML code that shows up and paste it into your WordPress Text or HTML tab.
This method is good if you have a smaller number of products to sell and arrange on your site. If you want customers to be able to buy multiple items in a single transaction however, you should use the WordPress plugin in the first option described in this article.