How to Add PayPal Shopping Cart to WordPress
Installing this plugin is just like installing most others, but I’ll layout the quick steps for one installation method below for you.
1. First, download the plugin from either the developers site, or the WordPress plugin repository.
2. Unzip the contents of the zip file onto your computer. You will extract a folder called “wordpress-paypal-shopping-cart.” Upload that folder in its entirety to the “/wp-content/plugins/” folder of your WordPress install.
That’s it for the installation. Now head to the settings screen (under the Settings >> WP Shopping Cart menu) to enter values into the required fields.
For the most part, everything is ready to go, and the shortcodes (which are shown in the Quick Usage Guide) can be used straight away. They take the parameters for “product name,” “product price,” “shipping cost,” etc. The rest of the information that gets passed to the PayPal shopping cart are global values.
By default, the PayPal email address that will receive the payments is the WordPress admin email address. In most cases, that will suffice. You can easily switch that email address to your existing PayPal email address if it’s not the same, or even add that email address to your list of “payee” email addresses in your PayPal account.
If you’ve created a PayPal Sandbox account from the PayPal Developer site and intend to test the store with “fake” payments, be sure to use that email address and enable the sandbox testing from the settings page.
Be sure and modify the Shopping Cart title field as the default is “Your Shopping Cart” which may not be appropriate for your production site. One interesting consistency with plugins developed by Tips & Tricks HQ is the double use of fields as both text and image fields. As an example in this plugin, you can customize what is displayed when the cart is empty. You can place text in that field, or the URL of an image to represent an empty cart. Same for the “add to cart” button.
The currency is setup as USD by default with the standard dollar sign ($) symbol, but all currencies supported by PayPal are supported by the PayPal Simple Shopping Cart plugin.
Setting up Shipping for the Simple PayPal Plugin
The amount for shipping can be included in the shortcode that displays a product, so shipping costs can be on an individual product basis. There is also a global amount that can be added over and above the individual product shipping costs. This can be added by changing the Base Shipping Cost to a value other than 0 (zero).
The base shipping cost only takes effect when the products in the cart have shipping costs applied to them. That way, if someone purchases a digital downloadable item from the store which doesn’t carry a shipping cost, the base price will not take effect. This isn’t ideal because in some cases you may only want the base shipping cost to reflect the total shipping cost for the cart for physical products. The workaround is to use a shipping cost of $0.0001 for individual products as that won’t affect the total (because it rounds), and only the base shipping cost will be present in the cart at checkout.
Since the base shipping cost is only added when there are items in the cart that carry an individual shipping cost (even if the cost is too small to affect the shipping total), this allows for a lot of flexibilty. Not only does it let you have a base price that isn’t included for digital products (as discussed), and allow you to show just the base price, you also have the ability to offer shipping discounts.
For example, in the event that there are two products in the cart that each have a $10 shipping cost associated with them. $10 is reasonable for one, but it might be reasonable to charge just $15 for both, rather than $20. You can accomplish that by leveraging the base shipping cost option.
In this example, you would set the shipping cost of each product to $5 (rather than $10), and the base to $5 (rather than $0). In this scenario, purchasing one item will cost $10 for shipping ($5 for the product, $5 for the base). And when purchasing both items, the shipping will be $15 ($5 + $5 for each items shipping cost, plus the $5 base).
You can also input a cart value that when exceeded, shipping will be free of cost.
In additon, you can override shipping completely and have it use PayPal Profile Based shipping instead if you have that setup in your PayPal account.
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