In a simple Paypal web store, how can you add multiple items to the cart with one page load?

Question

I use the Paypal "Website Payments Standard" system on my website - I believe this is their term for the simple style of "Add to cart" button that you can set up under Merchant tools in your Paypal profile. The way it works is that you set up the button's price, name and shipping details in Paypal's interface, then you paste it into your page. It is safest to have them host the button's price data, because then the user cannot edit the price to be lower.

This is easy enough, but in my small-ish web store of 10 items, I feel that I am losing opportunities to sell more stuff due to the fact adding each item means 1. Clicking "add to cart" for that item 2. Reviewing the cart on the Paypal page that loads 3. clicking "Continue Shopping". It's messy and ugly.

What I wanted to know is if there's a way around this clunky method that sticks with the Paypal-hosted buttons system, and doesn't introduce an alternate pre-Paypal shopping cart to confuse things and upset customers. I imagine being able to replace the "add to cart" button with "Added to cart!" once clicked, while in the background Paypal is informed that the button was clicked.

http://www.simplecartjs.com/ is an example of a system that lets you add multiple things to a cart before submitting, but it does it with a GET string that'd be very easy to manipulate. The buttons aren't hosted on Paypal, in other words. It also has a duplicated cart that I think might get confusing for people (though that's not a dealbreaker, and could be worked around.)

Answer 1

See this integration guide on PayPal's site:

https://www.x.com/developers/paypal/documentation-tools/paypal-payments-standard/integration-guide/formbasics#id08A6F0Q0QY4

This gives information on how to modify the form markup for the HTML buttons to allow different types including different cart functions (Add/Display/Upload). This will only apply if you are not saving the button details in your PayPal account instead of storing the button details in the HTML on your site (would show if you are storing the details on PayPal).

If you are storing the button details on PayPal's site, we will likely not be able to help you without access to PayPal's interface to see the available features for each button to see if this is even an option. Providing the code to one of the buttons would be very helpful.