I’ve been trying to hook up the PayPal Merchant Services with one of my blogs at the moment so that I can receive money for a specific service that I offer online.
The simplest version of the merchant services that they appear to have is the “PayPal Button” which allows you to enter a lot of different settings into a button that is hosted directly by PayPal and is loaded onto your site via a piece of script.
While the system appears quite simple at the start, there are a lot of settings within the specific button that take some time to figure out. To generate three saved buttons that could be loaded on my website it took trial and errors of probably 10 different buttons with different settings to get it right.
One of the most frustrating things I found was finding out where the “Saved Buttons” were that I had already generated before. Every time you go into their system to try and find them after clicking on the basic paypal merchant services links it always took me to generating a new button. In the end I was generating new paypal buttons just to get to the saved buttons!
After sorting our that the buttons were in the “My Profile” section (of course, how obvious) it was ok from there and I could add and delete them fairly easily while testing the settings.
Even with getting through this, the PayPal Merchant Service buttons are by far the simplest solution for gaining payments from your website without having to have an entire shopping cart or payment system in place.
Give them a go if you’re looking for quick and simple payments and don’t have the facility (or programming knowledge) to get a full payment system in place yourself.