Blog Banners and Backgrounds – Laycock Designs

Sell your creations on your blog with a PayPal storefront

I just took the new PayPal Storefront Widget for a test drive. The PayPal storefront was released today and I was excited to try it.

First, I was asked to sign in to my PayPal account.

There is an orange button to click on that says "Create New Storefront".

You will see a new store created for you on the right sidebar.

Click on your store and you will access an editing tool to customize your store.

Step 1 is to Modify your Storefront

You have a choice of themes and colors. Then you can enter a title and a store logo if you have one. The store logo should be 60×35. For my blog banner customers who’d like to get a matching logo for their PayPal storefront, I can include one in my regular price for no extra charge.

You can also change the color of the text in your storefront.

The next option is to describe your shipping policies, contact information and any additional notes to potential buyers such as "satisfaction guaranteed".

Listing your products is the next step. Enter your product name, price, description, and a photo. There are several options from which you can choose:

• Show all products (great if you only have a few items for sale)
• Show currently selected product (for those with lots of product and would like to highlight one item)
• Rotate product pages (for those who would like a rotating selection of products)

You may show how many of your product is available. Then, when your item sells, you have a choice of showing product as sold out, or hiding the product until inventory is restocked.

There is an option available for opening and closing your store. If you need to close your store temporarily, choose that option and provide a message to your customers if you’d like! You can also indicate that your customers can still shop while your store is closed and leave a note saying that shipping will be delayed.

This widget is easy to use and configure. One drawback is that the widget itself can’t be re-sized to fit in a smaller width blog sidebar. For example, view my test storefront in the right sidebar of this blog. Notice that with a three column blog, I needed to increase the sidebar pixels of the blog so the storefront would fit. Bloggers using a two-column layout should not have this problem.

On another note, I tried editing this widget using older versions of Internet Explorer and FireFox. I was not able to use the editing tool. If you have an older browser, you may need to upgrade to make use of this widget.

Lastly, you will need to "Publish your Storefront". If you are using Typepad, you will have the option of choosing the "Typepad" option and following the instructions. If you are using Blogger, Wordpress or another platform, you may copy/paste the code into your source code where you’d like your store to appear.

Next step: I will need to upload something to sell and test how this widget handles the transaction! That is the subject of another blog post!

Posted on : Dec 04 2007
Posted under Online stores and selling |