I have to take a moment to state a breif disclaimer. This guide is not an official paypal guide and I do not provide any gaurentee for the following setup process. This is a free guide meant to help to get things rolling, for all questions or concerns you should contact paypal or consult their documentation. With that out of the way, we can get back to paypal.

This guide will help you create a developer account, add a paypal button to your site, and if you continue on it will show how PayPal can send you verification to your site and use php to process the information. If your looking for something simple, just follow it to the add a button and you can stop there.

Before you start giving out your bank account info and all that information to set up your account, consider creating a developer account. Developer accounts provide you the opportunity to set up the payment system on your website and test it with fake accounts to get all the bugs ironed out before you accept your first real payment. All activity with the developer account takes place in the “Sandbox”, which is simply put, a safe place to get your hands dirty.

To set up your account you will need to go to the following link and signup for an account.

https://developer.paypal.com/

Note: This account will NOT be your real money processing account. To prevent problems in the future you should use a different login than what you plan to use for your future “Real” account. You do not want both accounts to be the same in case you need to give access to your develper account to someone else (outside person). This helps prevent unathorized access to your real with all the money you will have.

Once you have created your developer account continue on to Part 2 of this guide.