How to add PayPal purchase buttons to your Squarespace website

Image of PayPal for business website

To add an e-commerce section to your website, it is difficult to find the right platform for your business.  When we chose Squarespace, we knew we would get Stripe as an e-commerce platform for the website.  We were impressed by the simple to understand sales and revenue reports.  However, choosing the personal plan limited us to only selling one product. 

We needed another option to sell more products on the website.  After looking around we selected PayPal because it is one of the world's widely used e-commerce pay platform.

You can add PayPal buttons on to your Squarespace site without having any coding experience.  The following is simplified steps of how we did.

When creating your Squarespace website

• Enabling a site-wide password allowed us to hide our website from the public
• We created the Page (PayPal buttons only work on a Page) that we wanted to sell the product/service on
• We then added the ‘code injection’ block under the products we wanted to sell

Head to PayPal and sign up for a business account.

• You can add in your bank account details later (ensure you add the details before your website goes live)
• Go to the set up section and select the HTML code section (2)
• Click on the ‘create buttons’ after it opens up the explanation
• Choose the button e.g. ‘Buy Now’ and give it a name
• Select the attributes you want on the button such as quantities, low stock notice, etc
• You can complete the two optional sections for the button
• We recommend you do Step 2 to track sales and revenue which is handy for tax time
• Once you have completed the sections click on the ‘Create’ button
• This takes you to a screen which shows your created HTML code that can be injected to your website
• Copy the HTML code

Go back to your Squarespace website

• Go to your e-commerce page and select edit  
• Go to the ‘Code Injection’ block and paste the PayPal code in to this section and save (the PayPal button should appear)
• Save the Page and click on the button to ensure it takes you to the PayPal site

To edit your button, sign in to PayPal and go to “create buttons’.  Under the button types, click on ‘go to saved buttons’ and select the name of the button that you want to fix.

That is how we were able to add the PayPal buttons to our website.  Adding a PayPal button to your site may sound difficult if you have no coding experience, but this process will make it easier for you to add the buttons to your site.  Have you added PayPal buttons to your Squarespace site?  Did you do it this way or did you find an easier way to create the buttons?

How we solved the problem of connecting Gmail to Squarespace

Image of Google Apps for business website

With Squarespace we saw that we could connect our business Gmail to the website.  This was perfect for us.  The problem started when we tried to set it up, we could not work it out.  We scoured Squarespace for the solution and the community section for an answer to our problem.  So if you are looking for a solution to connect Gmail to your Personal Squarespace site, then this is it.

Solution 1 – You haven't signed up to Google business apps

If you take Squarespace’s personal service, it is better to buy it through Squarespace.  To do this, go to ‘settings’ and then go to ‘emails’.  This should bring you up a screen that says ‘Professional email with Google Apps’ with the two options.  Choose the option you want and that should be it.  We assume Squarespace will set up your professional email; we didn’t do it this way.

Solution 2 – You signed up Google apps separately from Squarespace

The problem is due to the fact that the Google apps you have is external from Squarespace.  Your Gmail won’t work due to the fact that you need to set up the MX Records and you need access to your domain.  Please ensure that the Google Apps HTML code is embedded in your domain for verification before attempting this part.

Approach these steps with caution because changes you make can affect your domain on Squarespace. 

Begin by going to Opening DNS Settings. 

• Follow Step 1 to Request access to your DNS Settings.
• Step 2 should result in you receiving an email granting you access to your DNS Settings
• Then in Step 3 you need to log in to the Hosting account to make DNS changes
• Step 4 involves editing the records by going to the MX Records section and click on ‘Add’.  This should bring up your domain name (‘subdomain’), ‘priority’ and ‘Hostname’.

For the Priority and Hostname, we used Google Apps MX record values.  Place the priority and destination from Google support in to priority and hostname.  Ensure you place the alternate Google sites as well.

Example – In the MX records section put         1 (priority)       ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM (hostname)

Then go and use Google Apps Toolbox CheckMX tool to investigate if there are any potential problems with your DNS record configuration that might affect mail delivery to your domain.  You should see a majority of green ticks.

Finally, test your domain by sending an email.  If done correctly, the email you send to your domain should end up in your Gmail account. 

We like to give special thanks to Jennifer at Squarespace support for pointing us in the right direction to help solve our problem.  If people have gained Gmail through Squarespace, we’d like to know if they set it up for you.  Did this help solve your problem of setting up your separate Gmail and Squarespace accounts?