How To Setup PayPal Subscription & Recurring Payments
If you need an easy way to accept credit card and bank account payments for content site subscriptions, newsletter fees, club dues, or recurring donations, PayPal offers an easy way to do it. I recently started selling private advertising spots on my blogs and needed a way to automate the monthly hassle of recurring payments. Luckily I already had a PayPal account so all I needed to do was figure out how to set it up.
To be honest, it was a real pain to read and try to figure out how to set it up via PayPal. Their site has too much information and it’s very clear what features come included with my current account setup. I spent a few hours searching Google and the PayPal website only to eventually find the best solution which I’m not sharing with you.
So you basically have to choices — you can setup subscription buttons and place them on your website or create email links and send them out to your customers. Since I’m selling ad space on my blogs, I decided to be more personal and email each customer and include a link. Here are the steps you need to take once you have a PayPal account setup.
- Login to your PayPal account
- Click on the Merchant Services tab at the top
- Then under the “Create Buttons” section, click the “Subscribe” link
- This page is where you setup the subscription information. This link explains it in detail.
If you’re setting up payment via email, make sure you change the last option “button encryption” to “No” otherwise you won’t get the email link. Also, the email link is really long and will break if you just paste it directly into your email. So what I did was use a free url converter called TinyURL and created a much smaller url which I then included in the email.
That’s pretty much it. I hope this post saved you time and you were able to easily and quickly create your PayPal subscriptions!
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This saved me a few hours of research. Mad Props.
” I spent a few hours searching Google and the PayPal website only to eventually find the best solution which I‚Äôm not sharing with you.”
Come on mate, if you know of a better solution why would you keep that too yourself????
Thanks! This helped me a ton! PayPal doesn’t always explain things the best way, but you explained the steps perfectly.
Thanks for this, it was a big help!
“only to eventually find the best solution which I’m not sharing with you.”
Did you mean to type “now” instead of “not”?
Thank you David. I was getting annoyed with Paypal and luckily found your blog post. I am sure that you saved me a lot of time.
It really is dead simple but they have to make things so complicated.
Keep Blogging!
-Chris
Good stuff, thanks for the tutorial!
I’ve been looking everywhere for a solution to this. Thanks, I’m goign to try this for one of my new sites.