jennifermontes

Many artists and makers rely on donations to make ends meet and use PayPal’s “Donate” button to make collecting money from their fans as painless as possible. However, according to PayPal’s Terms of Service, the “Donate” button is only intended for fundraising. In their own words:
<blockquote>
If you are not raising money for a cause, please choose another option. Nonprofits must verify their status to withdraw donations they receive. Users that are not verified nonprofits must demonstrate how their donations will be used, once they raise more than $10,000.
</blockquote>
What’s more, many bloggers have had their PayPal accounts suspended before reaching the $10,000 limit simply because they were using the “Donate” button in a way that PayPal did not intend.
To overcome these limitations, artists have switched over to what is generally called a “Buy me a beer” button: a PayPal “Buy Now” button with a fixed dollar amount, usually between $2 and $10, so that fans can still give money without expecting something tangible in return.
The “Buy me a beer” button has taken on many different forms depending on the personality of the person receiving the money (“Buy me a coffee”, “Buy me subway fare”, etc.) and generally works very well, but it has a severe limitation: only fixed dollar amounts are supported. Many people add a drop-down list of various dollar amounts in order to give fans some flexibility, but they are still values that were prescribed by the author. To give fans ultimate flexibility, and make sure makers don’t miss out on people wanting to support their work with big bucks, the Support My Work widget was born.

Support My Work

A WordPress widget that displays a PayPal "Buy Now" and lets users specify the amount that they wish to pay.

tstachl

Another small and beautiful plugin. It adds a fully customizable PayPal button 
to the posts. The only thing you have to do is put [donate] in your post or 
 in your theme. Via the options panel it 
is fully customizable.
If you want special settings in one post or somewhere else you can set some 
attributes. For example:
<h4>Updates</h4>
27.09.2009
Page Style has been added.
<h4>Attributes to customize</h4>
email = Your PayPal Account 
title = The title of the page where you redirect your donators 
return_url = The URL where the donators are redirectet. 
cancel_url = The cancel URL. 
amount = The amount you want to have. 
ccode = Currency code (USD = United States, EUR = Europe, …) 
image = The Image of the button.
<h4>Customize in post</h4>
If you want to customize the button in your post you write: 
[donate email=”me@example.com” title=”Donate for me once more” return_url=…]
That’s all!
<h4>Customize in theme</h4>
It’s nearly as easy as in posts. You write:

<a href="http://thomas.stachl.me/2008/11/30/tutorials/wordpress-paypal-donation/" rel="nofollow ugc">Live demo (at the bottom)!</a>

WordPress PayPal Donation

This plugin adds a PayPal donation button to posts and/or theme.

Support My Work vs WordPress PayPal Donation