How to customize PayPal payment pages and where can we find https location to store PayPal header image?

PayPal gives an option for its Premier/Business account holders to customize payment pages. Using customization one can replace the email id displayed on top of payment pages with the company/website logo. This can make the whole look-and-feel more professional.

How can you customize PayPal Payment pages?

This step really took me a long time. I wish PayPal makes its search more user friendly. The keyword system of search simply doesn’t work inside PayPal. And as always my favorite DP forums came to rescue.

Coming to the point, here is a step by step guide to create your own PayPal custom payment pages:

1. Log into PayPal account > Click on ‘Profile’.
2. On the right hand side, you will find ‘Selling Preferences’  box. Click on ‘Custom Payment Pages’ link. 
3. The next page is ‘custom payment page styles’. From this page, you can Add, Edit, Preview, and Remove page styles, as well as make any page style your Primary style. By default ‘PayPal’ page style is the primary style. You may add up to 3 page styles. To add a page style click on ‘Add’ button. 
4. On the next page, you can fill your custom settings. Give a unique name to the ‘Page Style Name’ box. The next edit box asks for the ‘Header image URL’. This is the most tricky part, in the next point you will understand why. 
5. Now you need to give the Header Image URL. For the header image, PayPal allows you to specify an image 750 px wide and 90 px height, that is reasonable by any standards. Problem occurs with their recommendation of asking us to store header image only on secure (https) server. Though you can store image on http: server also, but it will give a warning to your users that the payment page contains insecure items. That is as good as not having the image altogether. Unless you are a reasonable size company, I don’t think you would be having a https server. [If you have, that's good. You can safely skip this point]. So where can we find a free https server (also known as SSL server)? A quick search on SSL Image Hosting will throw up a lot of free and paid choices. I prefer SSLPic, firstly because they have a no-nonsense interface which doesn’t require you to create a user account and secondly because it is from the reliable e-junkie . It also provides you with the stats regarding how many times people have clicked on your ‘Buy-Now’ buttons.
6. Once you get the URL, place it inside the ‘Header Image URL’ box. Fill in the header background color, header border color and background color. I prefer having the header colors same as my logo. If you find difficulty in getting the exact hex code of your header, try Instant Eye Dropper
7. Save the button.
8. Now you have two option, either make this style as a default primary style or leave it as it is. If you choose to make it as primary, all your button payment pages will get default settings as you have defined above. On the other hand, if your PayPal account is used for more than one businesses, you may want to leave it as it is and choose the settings on button by button basis.
9. Now how can you associate your button with the style name ROW defined above? Go to ‘Edit your PayPal Payment button’, head over to Step 3. On the bottom of this step you will find a box labeled Advanced Variables (power users). Check the ‘Add advanced variables’ option and fill in page_style=<Your Style Name> as also shown in the image below. Save the button.
10. Clink on your PayPal button. You should be able to see the new header style for your PayPal payment page.

Enjoy!

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Related: Tips every PayPal user should know

Tagged as: PayPal, SSL Image hosting