PayPal allows purchases to be completed using just a credit card and without forcing the customer to become a PayPal member.

The "PayPal Website Payments Standard" account that HotDoodle supports has the following features according to PayPal as of April, 2006.

The PayPal® Button Block lets your visitors purchase products and services through your site. This module uses published interface features of PayPal's free "Website Payments Standard" merchant account to send payments to PayPal and to be informed as payments are made.

To Learn more about the HotDoodle PayPal Block usage and capabilities, click here, and to to learn about configuring a Product Catalog Block for basic ecommerce, click here.

If you are already familiar with the PayPal and Product Catalog Block, move on to setting up your PayPal Merchant Account and Configuring PayPal:

You must first create a Merchant Account and then you must configure PayPal within your HotDoodle site.

Note: If you already have a merchant account, skip to configuring PayPal.

Below are steps and recommendations on setting up a merchant account.

1. Visit www.PayPal.com.
2. Click "Sign Up".
3. Select "Business Account”.
4. Choose "Website Payments Standard", the free option
5. Proceed by clicking "Go" next to "Sign up now".
6. Continue through the forms - you may get to one that asks for bank account or credit card information. You may skip this step by selecting “I'll answer it later". You are not required to supply this information; however it is generally a good idea to supply this information at this time.
7. After exiting the sign up process, check your email inbox and respond to a PayPal verification email.

Note: All information provided is between you and PayPal, and is not shared with HotDoodle.

Now proceed with the "Go" next to "Set up your payment solution".

You may see a form asking what you intend to do. As far as HotDoodle is concerned, all you need is processing payments on your website. You may chose the other options, but be aware that while PayPal charges no monthly fee for the website payments, support for some of the other choices incurs monthly charges from PayPal.

You should see "Website Payments Standard: Solution Overview".  If this is not what PayPal recommends, you can chose to click it instead. ( You can always ass the other PayPal services later if you need them).

When you hit "Continue" you may be taken back to step 3.

If you click on "Go" from here you will be taken to a page that describes the payment service.

Oddly, while this page says many things about this service, there is no "sign up" or "proceed" link. Moving forward from here takes some non-intuitive steps.

From within Paypal and while logged in:

1. Click on "My Account" 
2. Then on the "Profile" sub tab.   
3. Then click on "Website Payment Preferences"
4. You should now be in a screen for WebSite Payment Preferences.

In here, set:

• Auto Return to on
• URL to your HotDoodle site's main URL
• Payment Data Transfer to on
• Block non-encrypted website payment to off
• PayPal Account Optional to on

Important!: You must save this form before proceeding to the next step.
If you do not, a field you  need will not be shown.

Getting the Identity Token

From within Paypal and while logged in:

1. Click on "My Account"
2. Then on the "Profile" sub tab.
3. Then click on "Website Payment Preferences"
4. You should now be in a screen for WebSite Payment Preferences.

Scroll down to "Payment Data Transfer" and you will see a secret "Identity Token" string. You will need to copy this string for use with HotDoodle.