Wild Apricot Blog : Add your very own online store to your website, blog, or social networking page with the Paypal Storefront Widget


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Add your very own online store to your website, blog, or social networking page with the Paypal Storefront Widget

PayPal has introduced an easier way for setup online shopping on your website with a web-based widget. This is a great tool for any community, charity, club, nonprofits and fundraising website. The PayPal Storefront Widget lets you embed a virtual storefront directly into your blog, website or social networking page. With the holiday season upon us, I see this as a perfect tool for nonprofits looking for a quick and easy way to sell gifts, donations and other merchandise online.

Highlights:

Some of the storefront widget features that I think are especially cool include:

The Paypal Storefront lets you create a simple display panel which features items you have for sale. People can browse through the different products and with just one click are able to read a description of it and add it to their shopping cart.

The widget includes a picture index of the items for sale through the widget, product pages giving customers a larger view of the selected items, an in-widget shopping cart, and a page that explains the store’s policy and conditions (also within the widget).

The new feature also offers thumbnail images to act as a storefront display, a “Sold Out” and “Store Closed” listing and even allows others to gain access to the link and post on their perspective sites. Buyers can select items to buy and then check out securely

Finally, the widget lets other people display your products on their own websites, you could use it as an advert that you change from the PayPal site so it updates automatically across the other sites. Some limitations include prices only being displayed in US dollars and paying a percentage of any sale as a fee.

Creating your storefront:

Here is a step by step on how to make your own Storefront Widget:

1. Go to the PayPal Storefront Widget Page and login to PayPal if you have an account. If not create one.

2. Click on Create new storefront to begin the customization proccess.

3. Choose a Theme (like a wallpaper) or color.

3. Choose a title and logo.

4. Add your shipping information, contact information and additional information.

5. Add your products. You can have multiple products to sell and it will scroll through them.

6. Choose if you want your store to be open or closed.

7. Post the widget on your website, blog or social networking page.

Add your storefront widget with just one click. If you have a TypePad blog you can publish. Or just grab the HTML code and paste into your page where you want it to display.

8. Share your widget with your friends

Share it with your network and ask them to post the storefront widget on their sites.

So this is how you would create a Paypal Storefront widget. How do you see yourself using this on your site?

Published Friday, December 21, 2007 6:35 PM by Creative Apricot

Filed under: Associations, Non-profit technology, General non-profit interest, nptech, Web 2.0, Widgets

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	Michele Martin said: Hi Soha--great post! I first saw this a few weeks ago at Typepad hacks: http://www.typepadhacks.org/2007/12/the-paypal-stor.html and actually started playing around with it for my Beyond the Glass Ceiling blog. It is VERY easy to use and set up and I think does have a lot of good applications. Although it's geared toward products, I'm curious about how well it might work as a way to have people sign up and pay for events, like workshops, etc. I used PayPal for my retreat earlier this month and if it could be done through the widget, that would be even better. That's something I want to play around with some more. December 22, 2007 7:02 AM
	Dave said: Thanks! Found this news here first. Great innovation from PayPal. They've come a long way since their early days. December 27, 2007 8:58 PM
	Casey said: I wonder if this release was a reaction to Google Checkout. It certainly has more functionality for product sales, though that might not be important for most non-profits. I know the non-profit I volunteer with will stick with Google Checkout for our event ticket sales and donations until 2009 since they have waived all fees: http://checkout.google.com/seller/npo/. January 2, 2008 10:07 PM
	Mitchell Allen said: Wow! What a great concept. Nooo, silly, not the widget. the part about sharing it across multiple sites. I used to have a non-profit for a client. I will suggest this to them and here's how I think they should use it: They belong to a fairly large business networking group. They should have a widget-raising festival! Ask everyone to sign up for the widget. (This is crucial! DO NOT ask them to put it on their websites...save that detail for later!) Once the organization has permission, they can follow up with an email that thanks the business for participating and then asks for the email address of their WEBMASTER! Obviously, 100% participation will not happen, due to non-response, but, like any fund-raising campaign, a consistent and persistent follow up should increase the number of businesses who get the widget installed. If I were spear-heading this effort, I would be more detailed. I would make sure that particpants had the option to provide an internal link to the widget if they didn't like it on the home page. However, if I check out their site and saw ads on the front page, I would really, really try to talk them into allowing the widget to share some space - it's for a good cause, after all! The power of this multi-site affiliation can not be understated. If we can discover clever ways of making the widget less intrusive, we can convince more and more people to particiapte! Cheers, Mitch January 16, 2008 1:51 PM
	Wild Apricot Blog said: Looking back on my posts for December 2007, these were the most popular posts according to Google Analytics: January 18, 2008 1:36 PM

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Add your very own online store to your website, blog, or social networking page with the Paypal Storefront Widget

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