Selling on Your Site: Tips on Using the Payment Button

With the Simple Payments button, the opportunities for selling on your site are endless: collect pet adoption deposits and membership dues, or sell dental conference tickets and music festival t-shirts. Here’s what you can do to make the most of this WordPress.com Business and Premium plan feature.

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Tip #1: Place your button strategically

D.C. Basketball Events, the website of the Dream Catchers Basketball program for girls in the US Pacific Northwest, promotes the upcoming 4th Annual Winter Jam with a can’t-miss image on its front page. Underneath, they display a contact form and payment buttons for basketball teams to register and pay.

The site also has a payment page for future events, but the bold homepage promotion of this weekend’s Winter Jam makes it timely and prominent. So if you want your readers to see something, place it front and center.

Science journalist Leonid Schneider, who writes at For Better Science, has a different approach for getting his payment button noticed: he displays it alongside donation messaging at the bottom of every blog post.

When you create a payment button for a particular item, you can insert it into more posts or pages on your site. It’s a great way to promote what you’re selling — or in Leonid’s case, to regularly ask readers to support his work.

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Tip #2: Effectively sell your services with high-quality images

Tom Bol has led photography workshops for over two decades. At Tom Bol Photo Workshops, you can sign up for group trips and private lessons, including a summer excursion to Badlands National Park in South Dakota and a fall trip to a classic car junkyard in Georgia. Tom’s participants can register and pay for each workshop on the signup page, which includes thumbnails of his stunning photographs from these destinations.

Uploading an image next to a payment button isn’t mandatory, but it’s an effective way to sell your product, event, or service. Original, high-quality images like the ones on Tom’s site are ideal, but in general, an image that accurately and clearly represents what you’re selling is key.

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Tip #3: Display a “Shop” tab in your main menu

Located in Minnesota, North Winds Wilderness School offers classes in wilderness survival and primitive living skills. The website’s menu includes the essentials, like About and Contact pages, as well as a Shop. The shop is small and currently sells two types of stickers and two kinds of gift certificates, but establishing this dedicated page for merchandise early on allows the store to grow over time. Using a clear label like “Shop,” “Store,” or “Buy” in your main menu makes it easier for visitors to discover the page.

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Tip #4: Promote your products visually on your site — and beyond

When you do all of the above, customers will come. Right? Well, not necessarily. There’s always more you can do to promote what you sell or offer. Consider Shanny Kiss at The Mind Body Spirit Tribe, who offers three types of tarot readings. Shanny displays imagery on her site that represents her style and practice — from cards to crystals — and uses her own custom images next to payment buttons to visually reinforce her brand.

The instructor at Morning Dew Creations also uses custom images across her site — check the top of her Classes and Workshops pages for examples. These custom banners nicely package and promote her services (and are fitting to share on other social channels, too).

If you don’t have design experience, sites like PicMonkey and Canva provide free image editing tools. Our tutorials on creating image widgets and custom headers might inspire you as you make your own payment button images and banners.

Not ready to create your own images? Try these styling options for your Simple Payments button.

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Upgrade to the WordPress.com Premium or Business plan to enjoy the Simple Payments feature — as well as advanced social media and customization options, unlimited access to all premium themes, and more.

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