How To Create Paypal Subscription Links

Sometimes you encounter a special need to use Paypal payment links instead of button codes. Like if you want to use custom payment/subscribe buttons which are specially designed to match with the other elements of your site. Or if you simply want to send the subscription link via email.

Unfortunately, Paypal’s documentations only talk about their payment buttons and its different types. But you can’t embed the codes for these buttons on emails, and sometimes you just need a link instead of a button code.

The button codes aren’t really that much customizable and if you need the freedom to customize your buttons in any way you want, you certainly need the link only. Here’s how to get it.

Login to your Paypal account and go to Profile->My Selling Tools. In the Selling Online section, click the Update link on the Paypal buttons row.
On the next page, click Create new button. Yes I know we’re creating a Paypal payment button this way, but just stick with me until the end.
On the next page, you’ll have to enter the details of your payment button.

Since this tutorial is about subscriptions or “recurring” payments, we’ll stick to that. Choose Subscriptions for your button type.

Fill in the other fields according to your requirements. Fields marked optional are well, optional. So you don’t really have to fill them. And the Customize button section isn’t really relevant for what we need, so you can also just skip that.

Then click to open the step 2 accordion
If you have special requirements for tracking inventory and profit/loss, you can specify them in the Step 2 section. In this section, I’d also recommend leaving the option “Save button at Paypal” ticked, for security.

And open up Step 3 if you want to customize more advanced features. Here, you can specify whether you want to let your customers leave you some special instructions/notes, whether you need to get their shipping address, among others.

Click “Create Button” when you’re done with all the optional customizations.
On the next page, you will get the button code which you can embed on your site. But this is not what we want, right? So just go ahead and click the Email tab next to the Website tab.

And there’s the subscription payment link you can use on emails or custom buttons on your site. It sends people directly to Paypal’s payment page where they will be able to setup automatic payment arrangements for their subscription.

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Nimrod

People don't really know what they want until they learn about it. Marketing educates people about what they want. I'm a marketer, therefore I'm an educator.