Tag Archives: Paypal

Tidy up your PayPal buttons

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If you have been using PayPal for any length of time to accept donations or payments for various projects you have probably gathered up quite the collection of redundant buttons.

Perhaps it is time for a quick spring clean? Or perhaps you have stumbled upon this article because you are looking to know where on earth you access the admin area for those buttons, either way — happy reading!

Here is a step by step guide from the main overview page you get once you log into PayPal, the link to go directly to the admin section for buttons is https://www.paypal.com/uk/cgi-bin/customerprofileweb?cmd=_button-management but I think it is important to try and find your way around sites manually, in case you don’t have access to a bookmark or something.

  1. Click on the Merchant Services tab.
  2. Click on the Manage Your Account button.
  3. Click on the button called Update Your Selling Preferences Now.
  4. There should be a list of options, including PayPal buttons, click the Update link.
  5. …
  6. …
  7. Profit!

Now here I would suggest you delete buttons you don’t currently use and don’t have any use for in the future — it will make your life a little easier the next time you need to update something.

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How to search PayPal transactions by email address or name

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This is something I have only just learned how to do, and I am sure a lot of people didn’t know it was possible because it isn’t the most advertised feature and the PayPal interface isn’t the most intuitive thing I have ever used.

  1. Log into PayPal
  2. Click View All My Transactions
  3. Click Find a Transaction

Easy! You can select by email, or name, or some others. Make sure you pick an appropriate date range and you will be flying!

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I just made an affiliate program.

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It is amazing what a few hours of concentrated work can do for you.

Months ago me and my buddy who work together on TFT were talking about the idea of an affiliate program for our users – to try and encourage them to promote the site amongst friends and family, and to maybe entice some of the bigger websites to send some traffic our way.

At the time I thought it would be a neat little project, but once I started listing the edge cases I noticed that this would be a bit of a slog to get right.

A combination of work and family issues stopped me from looking or even thinking about the affiliate program until recently, when my friend brought it up again.

This time instead of thinking about all the edge cases and worrying about replicating what some of the bigger affiliate systems do I brought it right back to basics.

I asked myself two questions.

  1. What is an affiliate system at its most basic form.
  2. What is the least amount of effort I can put in (both long and short term) in order to achieve this.

After spending maybe an hour mulling these questions over I had come up with a solution that would work.

5 hours later I had written, tested, debugged and deployed a solution that will work and will only need minor time investment to scale should we need to.

It won’t win any awards for being the most complete affiliate program in the world, but it will allow my users to make some money from the site and ultimately put more money into my pocket.

Normally I would love to go into the technical details of what I done, but how I have had to work it is such an edge case that I couldn’t possibly see it being useful to anyone. The short version is that it speaks to a couple of WordPress plugins and PayPal and to be honest will never win me a programmer of the year award.

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Renier Lemmens – The future of Mobile Apps

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The third talk at FOWA Dublin 2010 was by Renier Lemmens, the GM of PayPal Europe.

You may think it odd that a PayPal head would be invited to talk at a developer conference (Apart from the fact they were the main sponsor of the event) but early on in the talk Renier proved his tech-chops by listed some past things he had done (he has a background in computing) and even made light of the fact that he was no longer creating cool things on the web. (Paypal, on the other hand, have created some really cool new things which I will be talking about in a later post).

The mobile space isn’t somewhere I have played in really but we all know it has huge potential, Renier emphasised this by through out some mind blowing figures and projections (which unfortunately I didn’t take down with any context… If I can get my hands on the presentation I will update this).

One point he made which I don’t think can be stressed enough is that the online and offline world is blurring into one, very few people are ever truly offline and it is because of this that developers and creatives need to take advantage of the mobile revolution and that there would be some serious downsides to ignoring it.

One stat I did note down was that a figure of $400 Billion has been thrown up as a projected worth of mobile commerce, although nobody really knows what its full potential could be.  This figure leads on to what I believe has to be the main point of Renier’s talk (or at least the main thing I took from it), which is that you need to make it as simple as possible for that $400 Billion to come your way, you need to remove any barriers between the user and them parting with their money on your mobile site.

You can achieve this by keeping one eye on the mobile world as you create your ecommerce processes and design your interfaces.  One example given was iPhone apps which make you fill in all this information before saying you need to be at a computer to create your account.

Overall I thought this talk was interesting but I already had an idea that the mobile market was huge and that there are different things to consider when designing say shopping carts on mobile devices than you would on the web.

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