For this article Im going to assume you have a webpage and a paypal account.

Ok it took me forever to figure out how to make a "buy now" button on my website for the first time. So hopefully this will help someone that is having the same problem as I was. My first time setting up a payment system was very difficult, it took me days to get it to work the way I wanted.

I have two different websites that pay to the same paypal account. The problem was that after a customer would make a payment it would send him to a single page. So if someone buying product "A" finished making a payment they would be sent to the same exact page as someone buying product "B". That created a problem because both product "A" and product "B" are ebooks. I needed someone buying product "A" to be sent to a page to download product "A" and someone buying product "B" to be sent to a page to download product "B".

My problem was that I did not understand how the computers were talking to each other. So I will sum up how it works for anyone trying to do this for their first time. I will show you how to set up a button using a paypal account.

When you are in your pay pal account you can go to "merchant services" it is located along the top of the page. When you are in the merchant services page click on "buy now button", then fill in all the information on that page about your product. When you get to the bottom of the page there are two options "create button now" or "add more options". Click on the add more options. On the next page a little ways down there is a section titled "Customize your buyers experience (optional)" you will see a text form where you can enter a "successful payment URL" (This is the webpage that paypal will send the buyer to after he has completed the transaction). You can use a different successful payment URL for each item you sell. This is handy when you want to send a customer to a page where they can download something like an ebook or program.

Take note while you are doing this. Paypal does not keep track of how many items you have for sale. You really dont even have to use the "buy now button" wizard that they provide if you know how to correctly write the form in HTML formatting. In other words, when a customer clicks the button to "buy now" on your web page, the coding attached to the button has all the information about what the product is, to which account the money is to be sent, how much, etc. The when the button is clicked it tells paypal what to do. So when you know how to write the HTML formatting for the button you wont need to use this paypal wizard to create the buttons.

Here is where I ran into problems. If you are on the main "my account page" and click on the text next to your name near the middle of the page that says "edit profile". Then on that page under the "selling preferences" column, click the text that says "website payment preferences". When you are in that page make sure that "auto return" is "off" and that the "return URL" is blank. This option is a default, it means that if "auto return" is "on" paypal is going to send anyone that buys a product through your account to the "return URL" you specify. I dont know if the html formatting for the "successful payment URL" (that is attached to the buy now button) will override that default or not. It might. For now im not going to mess with that theory.