FYI: The PayPal Merchant product you will be using is called "Website Payment Standard". If you see information about different PayPal products on their website, know that this is the one that is related to you.

Once you have created your PayPal Merchant Services account, login to PayPal. There you will find three tabs of interest to you:

My Account

This is the first tab and should be your first stop in setting up PayPal. Look for the "My Business Setup" under My account tools in the right column. Go through each of the sections, at the very least the first three.

The Manage My Money section (the third section on the page) is especially important for removing certain restrictions on your website.

The My Account tab is also where you will need to go to withdraw funds from PayPal and transfer them to your bank account.

Create an Invoice

This is where you will be able to create invoices which will be sent to your clients by email.

Be sure to go through and configure the "Invoice Settings" sub-menu beforehand. Note that as of the writing of this, PayPal does not support the tax-on-tax system used in Quebec. If you need to charge both taxes, you will need to either issue a separate invoice or simply list the taxes as separate line items on your invoice instead of using PayPal's the built-in tax system.

Branding your invoice and payment screen with your logo is optional. Should you decide to use them, here are the recommended dimensions for the images:

  • Your Payment Logo: 500 x 90 pixels
  • Your Invoice Logo: 200 x 75 pixels

Merchant Services

Once you have setup your invoice the way you want it, this is where you will do most of your work in PayPal. It include many tools that I encourage you to explore. You can create payment buttons, invoices, manage payments and more. Eventually if you want to integrate an invoice and payment system in your site, this will be the place to find the required information to set it up.

There are also many Training videos in this section to help you figure stuff out.

As I mentioned, the PayPal product you will be using is called "Website Payment Standard". If you click on the link in the right column, it will take you to a page where they explain everything from what's included to how it works, setting it up and pricing for transactions.

Be warned. Paypal does not like it when you issue an invoice for a couple of cents and then issue yourself a refund for the same amount. They will let it go once or twice every once in a while but they can freeze your account if they find you doing any suspicious activity. the reason they frown on this is because they offer a sandbox version of PayPal where you can create test users and test merchant accounts and do all the learning and testing there. It's rather involved to set it all up and I only recommend that you go through all that trouble if you really need it. One example would be if you are trying to setup your website to process payments and want to test it to make sure payments will be processed before you try it out with real money and real customers.

Should you account be frozen, people say it can take months to resolve the issue. Many people have abandoned hundreds and even thousands of dollars because they could not get their account unfrozen by PayPal. Bottom line is that it is always best to be on your best behaviour with PayPal and you won't run into any problems.

Taking Payments

Reminder: Although it isn't mentioned anywhere on the PayPal website, your customers will have trouble making payments of $2,000 or over. When you get to that point, I recommend you find an alternate payment processing system.

Creating a PayPal Button on our WordPress page

As mentioned above, the button tools will be located on the PayPal Merchant Services tab.

Once you have created the button in PayPal, copy the code and paste it in your WordPress page. To insert the PayPal button code into a page, you have to click on the "HTML" tab in the editor and then paste the code in the appropriate location.

Don't panic when you click the HTML tab. You will see a lot of "HTML" code which may look very strange. The key here is to try to notice the text that appears on your web page and ignore (but don't delete) the rest. Look for the place in the text where you want to insert your button and paste the button code there. Once you are done, you can click the visual tab to get back to your normal view or just click save. If there is some extra stuff that will appear in the editor, don't delete it as it is part of the PayPal code you just pasted and will not appear on your web page.

French Invoices and Buttons

I am not exactly sure how to create French invoices and buttons. I suspect you may need to switch PayPal into French mode. This is available when on the My Account tab in the upper right corner of the page. Click on English to switch it to French. You will need to try it out. If you want to be sure, contact PayPal for assistance.  If you don't get the option to switch to French, you are probably don't have a Canadian PayPal account.

Contact PayPal for Help

You will find information on how to contact PayPal by clicking on the Help link at the top of any page on the PayPal website.

WARNING: Don't get taken

Occasionally you will receive fake emails from what appears to be PayPal asking you to click a link and login to your PayPal account. DON'T DO IT !!!
There are many con artists out there who try to get access to your PayPal account by sending fake messages by Email. These people have setup websites that look and smell just like the real PayPal website. If you want to take action on an email, manually open a browser window and log into your account without using the provided link.

Paypal only has one website: PayPal.com. If a PayPal domain is anything other than that, never enter your username or password on such a page. PayPal Canada is at http://www.paypal.com/ca/…

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