Integration Guide

Table Of Contents

Website Payments Standard Integration Guide September 2008 341

HTML Form Basics for Website Payments Standard

Prepopulating FORMs

With Account Optional turned on in your account profile, you can accept payments from

people without a PayPal account. However, checking out with PayPal is often faster than

forcing people to re-enter information that is stored on PayPal. For repeat customers, it is to

your advantage to get people to sign up for their own PayPal accounts.

During a payment transaction, you can prepopulate a FORM by including HTML input

variables specifically for this purpose. A complete description of these variables is found in

“HTML Variables for Prepopulating PayPal Checkout Pages” on page 361.

For a detailed description of how prepopulated forms and other settings affect the PayPal

billing and shipping addresses, see Appendix B, “Address Handling (U.S. Merchants Only).”

Sample HTML for FORM Prepopulation

The following sample HTML code shows the optional prepopulation fields with the required

variables in payment buttons. Your website dynamically generates the field entries from

information that your website gathered about the payer and includes the fields and their values

in the URL to which payers are sent when they click a payment button.

EXAMPLE 11.1 HTML Code for FORM Prepopulation

<input type="image" name="submit" border="0"

src="https://www.paypal.com/en_US/i/btn/btn_buynow_LG.gif"

alt="PayPal - The safer, easier way to pay online">

</form>