Paypal: How to sell your electronic goods

You will have noticed on my website a number of downloadable scripts accompanying articles. Since I spent a significant amount of time working on those scripts and this blog is certainly not contributing to my income, I felt it was just fair to ask for a donation.

In South Africa, a payment gateway costs quite a substantial amount of money and monthly fees. Many people don’t feel like donating Amazon gift-vouchers (although I know of one female blogger running a X-rated blog and she makes in access of 15K/p.m. on Amazon stuff alone). Paypal is an option if you either use Paypal to purchase a lot or if you have an European account to transfer your funds into (note, that there is currently no way to transfer funds into a South African account).

You will very quickly find out, that every PayPal script out there costs money. After an extensive web-search, I stumbled across NGCoders and their free PayPal processing script. You can download it from here. Their instructions are easy enough to get it deployed. I did have to modify the script, as I wanted to include donations which didn’t have a fixed price.

Once you have installed the above script, you need to enable IPN (Instant Payment Notification) on your PayPal profile page. The IPN-URL points to where the paypal.php is installed – i.e. http://yourdomain.com/paypal/paypal.php.

The best part about the PayPal script is, that it allows you to provide electronic content (via a hashed-URL) which is only available for a restricted period. This avoids the problem of people leeching your content.

The last part is to create a PayPal button via your profile and embed it into your page. If you want to know what it looks like, click on my donation button below: