Add Google Checkout Buttons next to your Paypal Buy Now Buttons in one click
February 16th, 2007 · 4 Comments
In the cool and easy tool department, here’s a nice quick hack I just finished: a tool that helps you add Google Checkout buy buttons to your PayPal Buy Now Buttons. This tool gives you an easy way to add Google Checkout as another puchase option, give your users more choice about their checkout process, and save on free transaction processing. Ecommerce is all about choice:-) Here’s how it works:
- First signup to create a Google Checkout merchant account, it takes 5 minutes. When you create your account, in the Settings/Integration tab check the box: “Allow shopping carts with name/value pairs to be sent to Google.”
- Then use the Google Checkout Buttons Appender page: it lets you add Google Checkout Buttons to any of your existing static html pages using Paypal Buy Now Buttons: you just need to specify your Google Merchant Id and the url of your site and click submit. The Google Checkout Buttons will contain the same product name, price and quantity as the existing Paypal Buttons.
- Test the new buttons to check they do what you expect: click the Checkout Buttons one the new page and determine wether the informations have been copied correctly.
- Copy the generated HTML and replace your page with it.
If you plan to use this tool often, specify your Google Merchant Id and use the link at the bottom to generate a bookmarklet. Bookmark the generated link. Then everytime you browse one of your page that contains at least one Paypal Buy Now Button, you can add Google Checkout Buttons simply by clicking on the bookmark.
This script currently only migrates simple unencrypted Paypal Buy Now Buttons that specify at values for these at least item_number, item_name and amount. It does not handle taxes and shipping. If you have pages that have more needs than that, please send me their url so that I can have some test pages to improve the tool.
Use it at your own risks: this is very much a personal work in progress. If you are interested in the source code this script is part of the open source project Google Checkout HTML API utilities. Use the project’s issue tracker to log bugs, and the Google Checkout Developer Forum for feedback.
4 responses so far ↓
1 Nigel Stratton // Feb 27, 2007 at 1:31 pm
How long do you think it would take to develop an XML Level 2 integration with C# 2.0 (Classic ASP is also an option)? That is assuming a good but not expert grasp of ASP.NET and C# and knowing very little about the checkout API.
2 patblog // Feb 28, 2007 at 9:44 am
The answer is as usual, it depends on the scope of what you want to do: but assuming you have all the services and business logic for your shopping cart already implemented and you just want to connect Checkout to it (to handle notifications, performs merchant calculation, manage orders), it could be done in a few days, a week at most.
Martin Omander has posted a complete .NET sample code at http://code.google.com/apis/checkout/samplecode.html that implements all the functionality of the API and demonstrates how to use it in ASP.NET.
he also published a great article about it at http://www.windowsdevcenter.com/pub/a/windows/2007/01/09/build-a-net-app-for-google-checkout.html
I hope this helps.
3 gina givone // Sep 7, 2007 at 10:19 am
I just finished integrating the paypal buy now buttons and the paypal shopping cart, but I like the idea of giving people the option. Will this work for shopping carts too? Does all the information in the paypal code go to google..ie product, sales tax when applicable, quantity, price, shipping? or do we have to set up each product within google for the google code. (does google give you the codes you need)
This is my first website and this is all very new. I think some people will be more comfortable with google. (does it work the same way as paypal>)
thanks,
gina
4 TraiaN // Nov 20, 2008 at 8:10 pm
Hi ,
I wrote an article on how to design an usable checkout button. It can be found at The best CHECKOUT button. Please, take a look.
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