Are you an Entrepreneur, Web Developer, Consultant, General Contractor, or anyone with clients to bill?

As long as your invoices don't total $2,000 or more, you can take PayPal payments on your website. There are several ways you could do this:

  • Use WP-Invoice plugin -- If you use WordPress AND you are in Canada or any other country that has complex tax requirements.
  • Use PayPal Website Standard Merchant account to create and send invoices -- Works great, even if you don't have a website -- as long as you don't need to charge more than one tax.
  • You can create a Make a payment page on your website where people will be able to make any size payment they want.

This last option is what we will be covering here today.

Did You Know?

DO NOT USE PayPal for invoices over $2,000. Although they don't explicitly say so, their system makes it very difficult to take payments over this amount. Trust me, it's not worth the aggravation that both you and your customer will experience for such payments. Besides, if you are typically invoicing more than $2,000 per invoice, there are cheaper alternative payment processing services around.

The idea is to send clients an invoice containing a link to a page on your website where they will be able to pay the invoice by entering the amount of their invoice.

Before you get started, you will need:

  • A PayPal merchant account. If you only have a PayPal personal account, you will need to create a separate Merchant type account. The free Website Payment Standard merchant account will do fine.
  • Three pages on your website:
    • A Make a payment page. This is where you will put the PayPal code.
    • A Thank you for your payment page. This is where people will be sent after making a payment.
    • Your payment transaction has been cancelled page. This is where people will be sent if they click Cancel while on the PayPal site.

To create the Paypal HTML code, you will need to:

  1. Log into your PayPal merchant account. If you only have a PayPal personal account, you will need to create a separate Merchant type account. The free Website Payment Standard merchant account will do fine.
  2. Create a PayPal payment button. It is found by clicking on the Merchant Services tab followed by the Buy Now button link/image (or just click the provided link).
  3. Created new button of type "Buy Now"
  4. In the Item Name field, type "Enter amount to pay:" and leave the ID field blank
  5. Leave the Price field blank (important!!!)
  6. Click the Customize text or appearance section of the Customize button section
  7. Change the Select button text from Buy Now to Pay Now.
  8. Click on Step 3: Customize advanced features (optional) section to show it (blue/grey bar). Check the boxes and copy the URL links for your Take customers to this URL when they cancel their checkout and Take customers to this URL when they finish checkout fields.
  9. When you are done reviewing your settings, click the Create Button button at the bottom of the page.
  10. If everything looks good, click the Select Code button and press CTRL-c to copy it to your Windows clipboard.
  11. Edit the Make a payment page on your website and switch to the HTML view if you have a WYSIWYG editor.
  12. Press CTRL-v to paste the code into the editor.
  13. Save your work.
  14. Optional: You may want to add some extra information to guide visitors through the process of making a payment, and especially what to do if they want to pay by credit card instead of by Paypal.
  15. The last step is to copy and paste the link to your Make a Payment page onto your invoice. It is highly recommended that you make the web address to this page as simple and as short as possible just in case your clients have to type it in. Afer all, you don't want to make it harder than necessary for them to pay you.

For more information and additional options

 

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