Luminous Landscape Forum
The Art of Photography => The Coffee Corner => Topic started by: robertwatcher on November 25, 2008, 10:57:56 pm
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Being that I accept payment for my products and services by Credit Card through my Paypal account, I decided that instead of having to send out an invoice every time someone wanted to pay me with either their Credit Card or by Paypal - I would figure out how to incorporate the "Pay Now" button that Paypal provides, into a custom webpage that anyone can easily access in order to facilitate their payments to me. It has worked very well for me for a year now.
Ideally a shopping cart is the best solution - but has to be maintained and would require various shopping carts to handle my different needs. As an example, I now am able to receive my wedding payments and portrait order payments far quicker than my previous method of them sending me a check by mail. If someone wishes to purchase a Gift Certificate, that is made easy with the payments page. If it is a service or advice that I am charging for, that can be accommodated.
I decided to make this FREE Simple Payments Webpage available to anyone who wishes to use it or customize it to their own needs. The basic Payments webpage looks like this:
(http://robertwatcher.com/rsw_public/12276699670917_payments1.jpg)
The zip package download is here:
http://finchandchimps.com/index.php?topic=143.0 (http://finchandchimps.com/index.php?topic=143.0)
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A Buy Now Button (form) from Paypal is definitely something that anyone can code themselves and add into their website. I can't tell you how valuable the simple payment method has been to me.
I decided to streamline the process for myself with this webpage script - and ultimately for those not quite as savvy with web design who may want to use it also - - - so that it is as effortless as possible to get going. Making use of the "payments.php" webpage should be as simple as uploading it to your web server and making a link to that webpage on your website (or providing clients with that link if you don't want it available to everyone). While it will work just fine out of the box, of course your Paypal ID will not be set up properly and so while you will be sent to the Paypal secure webpage, you won't be able to receive any payments with the default ID.
Some of the coding that I have done includes the ability to return from the Paypal website and display the original "payments.php" webpage with either a "Thank You" note when the transaction was successful - or an Error banner when the transaction was terminated. This can be a nice touch so that those attempting to pay, know what is going on - plus I like that they have been returned to my website.