Chapter 16

The PayPal Shopping Cart

In This Chapter

  • Creating Shopping Cart and View Cart buttons
  • Turning Buy Now buttons into Shopping Cart buttons
  • Tweaking the button HTML
  • Improving the page design of your product pages
  • Generating buttons dynamically

Buy Now buttons are a great way to dip your toe into the waters of e-commerce, but before long, you'll probably want a Shopping Cart. With a Shopping Cart, buyers can put multiple items into a basket before going to the PayPal Payment Details page to check out. Shopping Carts are good for you and your customers. Having a shopping cart encourages the purchase of multiple products from your site (more profit for you) and keeps the buyer from having to enter payment information for each product they want to buy (less aggravation for them).

Creating a Shopping Cart is almost as easy as creating Shopping Cart buttons. The beginning of this chapter shows you how. If you're the type that likes writing your own code (or tinkering with other people's code), keep reading. The latter part of the chapter shows you how to integrate the Shopping Cart with your existing Web site, even if you already sell products online.

Generating Shopping Cart Buttons

Creating a Shopping Cart button starts off the same way as creating a Buy Now button. (See Chapters 14 and 15 if you want to read how to create PayPal buttons.) Start by logging on to your PayPal account and clicking the Merchant Tools tab.

  1. On the PayPal Shopping Cart page under Accepting Website ...

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