You can use listing type sponsorship to let people purchase a more eye-catching link, or show them in a special place that regular listings aren't shown.

For 5.1.0+:

First, fill out the general settings at the top of Admin Panel -> Settings -> Sponsorship. You can use any of the three supported payment processors -- PayPal, 2checkout and nochex -- or you can leave all three of those fields blank and process payments manually.

Click the "Add Usergroup Sponsorship Level" link to add a level. Follow the instructions on screen.

After that, you'll see the levels you've created listed on the sponsorship settings page for you to edit.

If you want to require all listings to be sponsored, just set up sponsorship levels for all the listing types you have.

You can customize the payment buttons and the rest of the payments page at Admin Panel -> Templates -> Manage Templates -> "Sponsor Purchase - Listing Type". You can set the price in the paypal button to whatever value you want, and that amount will be credited to the account on purchase, and deducted at the rate specified by your sponsorship settings. In other words, feel free to have people buy in $100 quantities even if you want to deduct at $1/day.

You'll find a link asking your members to sponsor has appeared on the details page of their listings as well as in their member home list of owned listings.

Notes

To test paypal using paypal's sandbox, you need to set the $paypalsandbox tweak -- and remove it before going live.

For older, 4.1.x and 5.0.x versions:

You may choose to integrate WSN with PayPal or 2checkout to allow members to purchase category sponsorships. Follow this process:

1) Under Admin Panel -> Settings -> Sponsorship, activate "listing type promotion".

2) Create a new listing type with the appearance you want to give sponsored listings and place the needed html in your templates. To make it show up above all other listings even if you're mixing link types, you can set "Separate sponsored links from other types" to "yes" on your sponsorship settings page.

3) Back on the settings page in the sponsorship section, type the name of the listing type you just created into the "Sponsor Link Type:" box (if you wanted to have multiple levels of sponsorship, you could type multiple names here separated by commas).

4) Still in sponsorship settings, set the "Incrimental Fee" you wish to charge people for maintaining their listing in the sponsored listing type. This amount will be deducted from the listing's funds each day if you've kept "Deduct the incrimental fee every ___ days" set to 1. If you wish to make a one-time sponsorship which never expires you can set the deduction to be every 9999 days or every 0 days.

5) If using 2checkout, login to your 2checkout account and create a new product. Set the price to be the same as the price you set on your sponsorship settings page. Set the approved url for the product to be http://yoursite.com/wsnlinks/2checkout.php

6) If using paypal, login to your paypal account and activate PayPal's IPN (instant payment notification). Tell it to use the URL http://yoursite.com/wsnlinks/paypal.php as the script to pass information to. See paypal's help for details on IPN. If you already have another IPN script you have the option of specifying the return url inside the button instead -- if you do that, use yoursite.com/paypal.php?showsite=1 so that it'll pass people back to your site.

7) In your sponsorship settings set the item number to be the number of the product your created in 2checkout, or to an item number you are not already using for something else in PayPal (use 1 if you're not already selling any other products). You will probabaly want to create your own payment button for PayPal, be sure to give it this item number and place it in your listing sponsorship template. With PayPal the dollar value you set for the item doesn't matter, set it to what you want and WSN will correctly detect it and add that amount to the listing... note of course that this will be the incriment in which your sponsors can pay by selecting a quantity.

8) If using 2checkout, supply your 2checkout merchant id number in your sponsorship settings. If using paypal just supply your paypal email.

9) If you want to require all listings to be sponsored before they're displayed, choose "Require all listing submissions from non-admins to be sponsored?" on your sponsorship settings page.

This is all you need to do. When a member views their own listing details or goes to their member home, they will see an option telling them they can sponsor the listing. You can customize the sponsorship page in your templates. When their payment is processed, details will be passed back to WSN... WSN will automatically add the purchased amount of funds to the listing. (Please note that if a payment is made by e-check, it may take 3 business days to clear and the funds will not be added to the listing until it has cleared if using paypal.)

Each day or other length of time that you've specified, the fee you have set will be deducted from the funds of every sponsored listing. Note: Not from the member's paypal account -- the member deposits the funds whenever they choose and the full amount is credited to their listing, for gradual daily depletion. When the funds for a particular sponsored listing hit $0, that listing is automatically changed to the original type it was before it was sponsored (usually 'regular').

By default sponsored types aren't shown, instead you click the sponsor checkbox. If you want tolet people select the listing type and be autodirected to the payment page when they do, just replace the selector in your templte with a hard-coded one containing all your type options. You can then remove the sponsor checkbox from the template.

Notes

To test paypal using paypal's sandbox, you need to set the $paypalsandbox tweak -- and remove it before going live.