How does PayPal determine the language their checkout site shows the buyer?
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PayPal usually does a pretty good job of guessing the buyer's language preference. As soon as the buyer logs into their PayPal account to complete checkout, they will respect the language preference saved in the buyer's PayPal settings.
Before that point, on the initial PayPal checkout screen where the buyer would either login or provide their card details if they don't have a PayPal account, PayPal looks for some things to determine the language:
- Shipping country the buyer specified in their cart;
- Language preference cookie stored in the buyer's browser from a previous PayPal visit;
- Language preference in the buyer's browser settings;
- Residence country of the buyer's PayPal account;
- Residence country of the seller's PayPal account.
In case none of those conditions apply, or just to force a particular language, you can define a default language on our Buy Now button codes only, by adding &lc= to the end your Buy Now button's href= URL, followed by any locale code PayPal supports -- e.g., like so for German (DE locale code):
<a href="https://www.e-junkie.com/ecom/gb.php?i=1&c=single&cl=37&lc=DE" target="ejejcsingle"><img src="http://www.bagpiping.de/buttons/btn_buynowCC_LG.gif" border="0" alt="Buy Now"/></a>