User Guide

Button Manager NVP API April 2012 11
PayPal Payments Standard Button Manager API Overview
Inventory Management Using Hosted Buttons
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 Update a hosted button, which lets you to change individual parameters, such as price, in a
hosted button
 Manage hosted button status; currently, you can only delete a button
 Get and set inventory information associated with the button
Inventory Management Using Hosted Buttons
You can get or set the inventory level for the item associated with a hosted button. You can
also track inventory on options within an item, such as color or size.
If you enable inventory management for a button, PayPal tracks inventory for you and also lets
your buyer know if the item is sold out. You can specify inventory tracking on an item-by-item
basis, and also by option, such as color or size, within the item.
An e-mail alerts you if inventory falls below the threshold you specify. If an item is sold out,
you can specify whether or not to accept a payment anyway. Optionally, you can specify a
URL where your buyer’s browser is redirected if the item is sold out.
You can also enable profit and loss tracking for an item or option associated with a button. If
you enable this feature, you must provide the cost of the item or option. PayPal then calculates
your gross profit, which is the selling price of the item less the specified cost.
Inventory Management for Digital Downloads
If you use hosted buttons, you can chose to specify a list of download keys, which are keys
that you define and are associated with the item being sold. These keys are useful when you
want to sell digital goods with a key to enable access.
To use this feature, you set the inventory for the button to include one or more download keys,
up to a maximum of 1,000 keys. These keys are then available when you get the inventory for
a button.
For example, when a customer orders software or music, you could obtain an unused key from
the list of download keys and email it to your customer so they can download the item. You
are responsible for choosing the appropriate key from the list and how it is used. PayPal only
stores the inventory of keys and does not track how a specific key is used, although PayPal
does provide options for making this process simpler.
When you specify the inventory for a button, you can specify the usage of download keys:
 Whether the keys you specify should be appended to the current list of keys or whether the
list of keys should be replaced, which allows you to replenish the list of keys or replace the
list entirely
 Whether the list of keys are to be reused or not