Accept PayPal payments without showing your E-mail address!
Posted on November 1, 2006, 6:05 pm by E-junkie under E-commerceI just came across a post on http://paypal.over-blog.net/ (Thanks Stephane!) which solved a problem that has haunted me for quite some time now. I hate the idea of putting my e-mail in my PayPal buttons. Not that I want to hide it from the buyers..but I want to hide it from SPAM bots!
One obvious solution is to use PayPal's encrypted payment buttons.. but if you are generating your buttons yoruself..then it will require some serius work on your end to generate the encrypted buttons on the fly.
If you are anything like me, you will use the simple solution offered at http://www.paypalblog.info/article-4116254-6.html (The site's in French and "altavista's babel fish" translation sent me on a wild goose chase!).
The solution is -
Login to your PayPal account and scrolldown to the bottom. Click on "Referrals". You will see a link like
https://www.paypal.com/row/mrb/pal=WRDDZE4N3E3M2. Take the WRDDZE4N3E3M2 part and replace the value of "business" with it in your button code.
Before:
<input type="hidden" name="business" value="your.paypal.email">
After:
<input type="hidden" name="business" value="WRDDZE4N3E3M2">
That's it folks!
For those of you who are interested in knowing what Altavista was telling me to do -
"To find this code, you connect on your account and click (at the foot of the page, in the footer) on "Sponsorships". There, take the value after "stake =" and put-there in the variable "business". " :)
