Step 3: Success / Failure Pages - XSitePro Website Design

When you first arrive at this third tab, it will look like the picture below:

When a customer makes a purchase from your site, they are initially taken off your site to PayPal’s secure payment processing page. While it may seem counter-intuitive that you are encouraging visitors to leave your site, don’t panic – PayPal will send them right back to your site again on completing the transaction.

But where does PayPal send the customer, once they’ve parted with their funds?

Well, the answer is: One of two places.

There are two possible outcomes to a transaction: Success, or failure. The success scenario is obvious – the money changed hands – but the failure can be due to things such as incorrect details being entered by the shopper, or an invalid card number being used for example.

So, to accommodate both scenarios, successful and failed transactions, we give PayPal a destination page to which customers may be sent in either eventuality.

In short, if the transaction is successful, the customer will be sent to the ‘success page’ you specify, on your Web site. If the transaction is not successful, for any reason, the customer will be returned to your site at the ‘failure page’ you specify.

At a simple level, this means we can have two separate pages, each with it’s own message, for example:

(Success Page): “Congratulations! Your purchase has been successful…”

(Failure Page): “Sorry, there was a problem with your details… Please try again”

While this makes for a good customer experience (the customer being not only returned to your site, but to a relevant page) it doesn’t explain the full potential of this system.

Using the controls described below, we can use existing pages in our Web site, to serve as our success/failure pages, or we can create completely new pages, if preferred.

Success Page – Clicking the drop-down page selector, select a page in your existing site structure that you would like to use as a success page on your site.

This illustration shows the drop-down selector, expanded:

If you do not already have a page in your site’s page list that you feel is suitable for a success page you can quickly create a brand new page, right here from this screen, by clicking the button. This action will launch the standard new Web page window - fill this out as you would normally and the page will be created within your Web pages list.

If creating a new page, make sure you name the page appropriately, such as “success” to make it easy to identify within the list of your Web pages, later on.

Tip: If you have multiple products, you may want to create multiple, product-specific success pages, each up-selling the most appropriate product to the product that the customer will have just purchased (in order to be viewing the success page in question). These pages could even have a success-page specific Pop-up that gives an added incentive, or adds some kind of scarcity-factor to the offer, to make the proposition a truly compelling and targeted one.

When you have entered the necessary information for your new Web page you can click the button to create your page (in the Web pages list) ready for editing later. This action will also set the success page (in the Paypal wizard) to the name of your newly-created page.

Failure Page – Clicking the drop-down page selector, select a page in your existing site structure that you would like to use as a failure page on your site.

This illustration shows the drop-down selector, expanded:

Just like with the success page, above, if you do not already have a page in your site’s page list that you feel is suitable for a failure page you can quickly create a new page, from within this screen, by clicking the button. This action will launch the new Web page screen.

If creating a new page you should name the page appropriately, such as “sorry” to make it easy to identify within the list of your Web pages, later on.

It’s unlikely that you’re going to want to have multiple failure pages and so you should probably consider keeping the failure message non-specific, so that it can be used for multiple products.

Note: When you create PayPal products these products are available to you across all of your XSitePro Web sites. This of course makes it very easy to monetize your different sites with this centralized product list. However, since your different site will naturally have different page structures, your ‘success’ and ‘failure’ page settings will be specific to this particular Web site only. If you choose to insert a PayPal buy now button on another Web site you will have to specify new success/failure pages for that particular Web site.

Having selected/created your success and failure pages for this product you can advance to the next step (Tab 4) by clicking the button.