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PayPal Payments Overview

This section provides a brief overview of each of the products described in this manual.

PayPal Account Optional 

With PayPal Account Optional turned on, your customers who are new to PayPal can make 

credit card and debit card payments without signing up for a PayPal account. This setting is 

available from your Profile, and is available to Premier and Business accounts.

PayPal Account Optional is turned on by default for all U.S. Premier and Business accounts. 

This means that your customers who already have PayPal accounts will go through the same 

Website Payments experience to which they're accustomed.

Your new customers, or existing customers who are new to PayPal, will go through a checkout 

that doesn't require PayPal signup; however, they will have that option available after 

completing the payment. Whether customers sign up for a PayPal account or not, you can set 

your Buy Now, Donations, and Shopping Cart buttons to return them to your website, and you 

will still receive the same notification emails as in the current checkout flow.

For more information about PayPal Account Optional, see 

Chapter 4,  Account Optional

. 

Buy Now and Donations Buttons

PayPal makes it easy to accept donations and payments for single items through your website. 

The Buy Now and Donations Buttons feature can be implemented in minutes, giving you easy 

access to business from PayPal's millions of members, and any other buyer on the web. 

Because using Buy Now and Donations buttons to send and receive payments is secure, both 

you and your customers remain protected. PayPal automatically encrypts your confidential 

information using the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) protocol with an encryption key length of 

128 bits (the highest level commercially available). Your customers will not need to share 

their private financial information (e.g. credit card or bank account numbers) during the 

transaction, so they can complete payment while retaining security. However, using button 

encryption does impose some limitations, and therefore PayPal offers both encrypted and 

unencrypted button options.

The flexibility of our Buy Now buttons keeps your website working for you. You can accept 

payments from current PayPal members as well as people who have just signed up for our 

service, and you won't lose your customers after they have made a purchase the payment 

process lets you return buyers to your website, not lose them to ours.

Benefits of Buy Now and Donations Buttons include:

Website Payments Standard Checkout Integration Guide

August, 2005

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