In this tutorial I will show you how to create a very simple widget, which will allow you to sell your services or even non-SmugMug products on your SmugMug website. This tutorial uses PayPal payment gateway to pay for your services/goods – currently there is not possible to use a different payment gateway. However, if you find something better than PayPal – that will work on SmugMug – let me know. Once a customer clicks on the BUY NOW button – they will be redirected to PayPal to pay for the chosen service.

Generating PayPal buttons

First, you will need to generate all of the PayPal buttons that you would like to display on your page. Open this link and choose the second option:

This will open a new page, where you will be able to modify the button – I have set up mine like this:

Click the CREATE BUTTON button and copy the code that has been generated for you – you can paste it into a text editor so you can use it once we have moved to building the widget. My code looks like this:

<form action="https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr" method="post" target="_top">
<input type="hidden" name="cmd" value="_xclick">
<input type="hidden" name="business" value="yourpaypalemailaddress@mail.com">
<input type="hidden" name="lc" value="US">
<input type="hidden" name="item_name" value="Bronze Photo Session">
<input type="hidden" name="amount" value="560.00">
<input type="hidden" name="currency_code" value="USD">
<input type="hidden" name="button_subtype" value="services">
<input type="hidden" name="no_note" value="0">
<input type="hidden" name="bn" value="PP-BuyNowBF:btn_buynowCC_LG.gif:NonHostedGuest">
<input type="image" src="https://www.paypalobjects.com/en_US/i/btn/btn_buynowCC_LG.gif" border="0" name="submit"