While talking with a pro bono client today they were wondering how hard it would be to add an “add to cart” button instead of a single item “buy now” button on their site. At the time their website was developed (approximately 7 years ago) they only offered one item for sale.
Of course 7 years later they now have 5 items they sell online. Currently the solution is not setup to add items to cart but after doing a little bit of research today, it’s not hard to covert those… This is an example of what the “single purchase button” is coded…
1: <form method="post" action="https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr">
2: <input type="hidden" name="cmd" value="_xclick">
3: <input type="hidden" name="business" value="[email protected]">
4: <input type="hidden" name="item_name" value="Baseball Hat">
5: <input type="hidden" name="item_number" value="123">
6: <input type="hidden" name="amount" value="5.95">
7: <input type="hidden" name="shipping" value="1.00">
8: <input type="hidden" name="shipping2" value="0.50">
9: <input type="hidden" name="handling" value="2.00">
10: <input type="hidden" name="currency_code" value="USD">
11: <input type="hidden" name="return" value="http://www.yoursite.com/thankyou.htm">
12: <input type="hidden" name="undefined_quantity" value="1">
13: <input type="image" src="http://images.paypal.com/en_US/i/btn/x-click-but23.gif" border="0" name="submit" width="68" height="23" alt="Make payments with PayPal - it's fast, free and secure!">
14: </form>
The first step to converting the button is to add this to the form tag:
1: <form method="post" action="https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr" target="paypal">
The next thing you will want to do is to locate this line of code:
1: <input type="hidden" name="cmd" value="_xclick">
and replace it with this:
1: <input type="hidden" name="cmd" value="_cart">
This line will also need to be added to the form tag:
1: <input type="hidden" name="add" value="1">
Then you will want to locate the input-type-image area and replace that code with this:
1: <input type="image" src="http://images.paypal.com/en_US/i/btn/x-click-but22.gif" border="0" name="submit" width="87" height="23" alt="Make payments with PayPal - it's fast, free and secure!">
The finished product once you have finished inputting everything and swapping out these snippets of code should look something like this:
1: <form method="post" action="https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr">
2: <input type="hidden" name="cmd" value="_cart">
3: <input type="hidden" name="add" value="1">
4: <input type="hidden" name="business" value="[email protected]">
5: <input type="hidden" name="item_name" value="Baseball Hat">
6: <input type="hidden" name="item_number" value="123">
7: <input type="hidden" name="amount" value="5.95">
8: <input type="hidden" name="shipping" value="1.00">
9: <input type="hidden" name="shipping2" value="0.50">
10: <input type="hidden" name="handling" value="2.00 ">
11: <input type="hidden" name="currency_code" value="USD">
12: <input type="hidden" name="return" value="http://www.yoursite.com/thankyou.htm">
13: <input type="hidden" name="undefined_quantity" value="1">
14: <input type="image" src="http://images.paypal.com/en_US/i/btn/x-click-but22.gif" border="0" name="submit" width="87" height="23" alt="Make payments with PayPal - it's fast, free and secure!">
15: </form>
Fortunately for me the non-profit that was asking about this has now got their in-house IT guy to make the changes, it’s somewhat time consuming and if you only have 5 products or so, you can probably almost generate new add to cart buttons just as fast, which is what I recommended.
Creating an Add to Cart button – PayPal
Questions or Comments?