Monday, February 5, 2018

Instantly Populate Contracts from PayPal Payments

PayPal makes it easy to collect payments from anywhere and can be a great way for your customers to pay for your services.  Add WebMerge to your payment process and you can automatically populate all kinds of documents.  You’ll never have to copy and paste or manually fill out a document again!

In this example, we’re going to show you how to automatically populate a contract when we receive a payment from a customer.  We’ll then automatically email the contract directly to our customer for their review.

To get started, we’re going to setup the template for our contract using a Word document.  Inside our template, we’re going to add our logo, company info, and repeating contract info.  For the spots that we want to customize with our customer’s information, we’re going to use merge fields that look like {$FirstName}, {$LastName}, {$Address}, etc.

Here’s what our contract template looks like:
 

Once we have our template ready, we need to upload it to WebMerge.  From the Documents page in WebMerge, click the New Document button and enter a name.  On the next step, click Office Document then select the file from your computer.
 

After you’ve uploaded your template, you’ll be taken to the Settings tab where you can modify various options like the type of file that is generated and the name of the merge document.  For this example, we’re going to populate a PDF and then include the name of our customer in the contract file name.
 

Once you have saved your settings, we need to setup the email delivery so that the merged document is automatically sent to our customer via email.  From the Deliver tab, go ahead and Edit the default email delivery.  For the To address, you’ll want to choose the merge field for the customer’s email address.

If you don’t have a merge field in your document for the email address, choose <<other>> from the dropdown then enter something like {$Email}.

Feel free to edit any of the other email settings.
 

After you saved your email delivery, we’re done with the setup process inside WebMerge and we’re ready to setup the integration with PayPal.  To help with the integration, we’re going to use our friends over at Zapier.

Inside Zapier, we’re going to create a New Zap.  For the Trigger, we’re going to choose PayPal as the app then Successful Sale as the trigger.
 

Once you authenticate your PayPal account and setup your IPN, Zapier will run a test to make sure everything works correctly.  Follow those steps and continue.

Next, we’re going to setup the Action of our Zap.  For the app, we’re going to choose WebMerge and then Create Document Merge as the action.
 

After you authenticate your WebMerge account, Zapier will load a list of the documents in your WebMerge account.  Go ahead and pick the contract that you just setup and Zapier will load a list of the merge fields in your document.

For each merge field, you need to pick the corresponding fields from PayPal.  This tells Zapier how to send your PayPal information over to WebMerge so that it is populated in the correct spot on your template.
 

After you’ve matched up all of your merge fields, go ahead and save your Zap then turn it on.  We’re ready for a test!  Submit a new test transaction through PayPal and Zapier will send that transaction information over to WebMerge and your contract will be emailed out.

Here’s what our merged contract looked like:
 

Congrats, you’re all finished!  You can now instantly populate all types of documents from PayPal transactions.  Can you think of any other ways you can use WebMerge to simplify your paperwork process?

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