Change The Language Of PayPal After Someone Clicks A PayPal Button

PayPal buttons are great for either putting directly on your website or linking to through email, but if you are selling to international customers you may want to improve their experience by ensuring that after they click the button or link they are directed to PayPal with the content in a specific language.

You can’t currently set the language when creating a button, but you can add some advanced variables or modify the code that PayPal generates for you to ensure the users PayPal experience is in their language.

How To Change The Language The Easy Way

Step 1
Login to PayPal and create a button

create a paypal button

Step 2
There are a number of locale codes available in PayPal and for the purposes of this example, we are setting the language to French. If you want to use a different language you simply replace the value field with the locale code you want.

Click on the “step 3” tab and scroll down to where it says Advanced Variables. Check the box and enter lc=fr_FR to change the language to French.

Step 3
Save changes, copy the code PayPal gives you and use as you want.


How To Change The Language In The Code

Step 1
Create a PayPal button

Step 2
Save your changes and you will be taken to a page giving you two different pieces of code to copy and paste depending if you want to add a PayPal button to your website or if you want to send a direct link to your PayPal button via email.

paypal button code
Button Code
paypal button email link
Email Code

Step 3
We now need to add some additional code to specify the language we want PayPal to display in when someone clicks the button or link

Let’s first take a look at the button code. Below is the code you will need to add just below the form tag:

<input type="hidden" name="locale" value="fr_FR">

So you complete code will look something like this:

<form action="https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr" method="post" target="_top">
<input type="hidden" name="lc" value="fr_FR">
<input type="hidden" name="cmd" value="_s-xclick">
<input type="hidden" name="hosted_button_id" value="B6CUVZZ8YXXC6">
<input type="image" src="https://www.paypalobjects.com/en_US/ES/i/btn/btn_buynowCC_LG.gif" border="0" name="submit" alt="PayPal - The safer, easier way to pay online!">
<img alt="" border="0" src="https://www.paypalobjects.com/en_US/i/scr/pixel.gif" width="1" height="1">
</form>

If you want to change the language of the email link you will need to add the following into the url:

&lc=fr_FR

You should add this code just before where it says &hosted_button… So you final link will look something like this:

https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&lc=fr_FR&hosted_button_id=B6CUVZZ8YXXC6

Step 4
Try it for yourself