PayPal Hacks. 100 Industrial-Strength Tips and Tools

< Day Day Up >

Hack 38 Include Payment Buttons in Email Messages

Use the PayPal Payment Request Wizard to send Pay Now buttons from Microsoft Outlook.

Sending invoices via email with PayPal's Request Money feature [Hack #17] is a quick and effective way to ask someone to pay you. The Pay Now buttons PayPal includes in the resulting email make it easy for your customers to pay you; after two clicks and a login, customers with PayPal accounts can send you money in less than a minute.

But the Request Money feature has its limitations. While the email appears to come from you, it's actually sent from PayPal, which means that you won't be able to customize it fully. If you need to include pictures, files, hyperlinks, custom HTML, or multiple purchase buttons, you'll have to send the email yourself.

4.12.1 Creating PayPal Payment Hyperlinks

Adding a PayPal payment hyperlink to your own email involves nothing more than typing a simple URL [Hack #18] . The required parameters to create a basic hyperlink are email address, payment amount, and item name.

However, there are many optional parameters you can include in the hyperlink to help you provide a more complete payment record, such as the currency, item number, quantity, shipping, and request for shipping address. For example:

https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_xclick&business=

   email%40paypalhacks%2Ecom&amount=10%2E00&currency_code=USD&item_name=

   jersey&item_number=1001&quantity=1&shipping=3%2E00&no_shipping=0

As you can see, the hyperlink begins to become unwieldy. Hyperlinks this long or longer cause problems because email programs chop them up into smaller pieces when they wrap the text. More than likely, only the first piece will be hyperlinked and a customer will not think twice about clicking it and attempting to complete the transaction with incomplete information.

The simplest solution is to run the address through TinyURL^[1] (http://tinyurl.com), which will convert it to something that looks like this:

^[1] SnipURL (http://snipurl.com) also works and takes it a bit further with tracking features. For a similar, yet far less useful URL-processing tool, try HugeURL (http://hugeurl.com).

http://tinyurl.com/2tqz8

The resulting link is always short enough to be spared the aforementioned word wrap. Unfortunately, the https://www.paypal.com/ prefix will be lost, and your more diligent customers might avoid it.

See [Hack #39] for another, more official way to get shortened payment URLs, and protect your email from spammers in the process.

4.12.2 Using the PayPal Payment Wizard

Want something more professional-looking than a bare URL in your emails? Nearly all modern email programs support HTML (much to the bane of the minimalists among us), which means that you can replace ordinary URLs with hyperlinked, graphical buttons right in your email messages.

Simply use your email software's formatting tools to insert an image and then link it to a payment URL you construct. In fact, URLs in hyperlinks can be as long as 1024 bytes (characters), which is plenty for PayPal's payment URLs. Of course, there's a cost: these payment buttons can be time-consuming to create...until now.

Enter the PayPal Payment Wizard, a free add-in toolbar for Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Outlook Express that allows you to painlessly insert payment buttons into your emails.

You can create five different types of PayPal payment buttons, each with six different button designs:

Payment Button (Basic)

This type of button is easiest to use, because it requires only your email address and payment amount, but it offers the fewest options.

Product Button

This type allows you to enter product details and request a shipping address [Hack #28] .

Service Button

This type allows you to enter a service description [Hack #30] .

Auction Payment Button

Use this to request payment for an auction item [Hack #31] .

Donate Button

Use this to allow the donor to specify the donation amount [Hack #40] .

To use the Payment Wizard toolbar, start by downloading it from http://www.paypal.com/outlook and installing it on your computer. You might be asked to close Microsoft Outlook if it's open.

The PayPal Payment Wizard currently supports only Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express on Windows. If you're using Eudora or some other email software, or if you are using a Mac or Linux, you'll have to create payment buttons manually.

To insert a button with the Payment Wizard, follow these steps:

When your customer opens the email, he will be able to click the button and pay you after logging into his PayPal account. To test this experience firsthand, send the email to your own email address.

4.12.3 Including More than One Button in an Email

Since the PayPal Payment Wizard creates a new email message with each button, there is no way to use it to insert more than one button into a single email message. However, overcoming this limitation is easy enough:

Repeat the process for each additional payment button you would like to insert. To verify that the image and corresponding hyperlink have been pasted correctly, as well as to make any changes to the URL, right-click the button and select Properties.

< Day Day Up >