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?

Is Squarespace the right website builder for your business?

Image of Squarespace website at night

When you are starting out to build your business, most people will either hire someone to build a website or build it themselves due to fact that they do not have enough money to hire a designer.  There are several website builders such as Wix, Webydo, Weebly, Light CMS and Wordpress.  We tried Squarespace’s trail period as a website builder for our startup business.

Squarespace was launched in 2004 by Anthony Casalena.  It is a content management system that was originally composed of a website builder, blogging platform and hosting site.  Since then it has evolved to include ecommerce with Stripe, Google Business apps (optional) and it contains several analytic reports that is very handy for a startup business.

We decided to do it ourselves as we didn't have the money to hire a designer.  Our designated designer found the drag and drop feature very responsive after a while.  The use of blocks and images made the layout of the pages easy to manage and manipulate.  The ability to add our social media channels also gave us more scope to broaden the design of the website.  What we liked most about the system is the ability to see what it looks like on desktop, tablets and smartphones in real time due to the responsive screen feature. 

After a week in to the trial period, we decided to use Squarespace.  Although Wix and WordPress are free to use to design a website.  When we reviewed some of the products out there, we found Squarespace had more features and value for our business.  We decided to take advantage of the service and paid the annual fee. 

We would recommend any business that is starting out and looking for a platform to build their website to use Squarespace.  What website platform builder did you use when you started your business?  Would you use Squarespace after this recommendation?