How to Set up PayPal in WooCommerce

A secure and easy checkout experience is important for the growth and success of an eCommerce store, especially when complicated and lengthy checkout is one of the major reasons for cart abandonment.

There are many different payment gateways available to ease the transaction experience for both your store and your customers. PayPal is one of the popular ones among them.

This article will help you learn how you can set up PayPal in your WooCommerce store.

Why Choose PayPal over other Payment Gateways?

PayPal has been helping online stores by simplifying their payment processing for over two decades. It currently serves over 348 million active consumer accounts and 29 million active merchant accounts across more than 200 markets.

Other than being a trusted brand that offers quick and easy integration for someone with no development background it comes with a wide array of benefits as listed below.

Availability

PayPal is available in over 200 countries/regions around the world thus making it easy for users to open an account and start accepting payments regardless of where their business is located. It also supports 25 currencies to provide you with a seamless transaction experience within your store.

Different plans available as per need

When it comes to a payment platform a consumer’s needs might vary depending on the type of business they run. Thus to meet the varying needs of its customers, PayPal has come up with a combination of payment plans including, solutions including PayPal, PayPal Credit, Braintree, Hyperwallet, Zettle, Venmo, and Xoom.

Easy Integration

PayPal can be easily integrated with WooCommerce by anyone with little or no development knowledge at all.

How to Set up a PayPal Sandbox Account

Sandbox mode simulates a live PayPal production environment and lets you initiate a transaction that behaves exactly like a live one so you can test everything is working fine. Following are the steps to create a Sandbox account with PayPal.

Follow the below steps to create a sandbox account for your WooCommerce store.

Step 1: Navigate to Payments tab from WooCommerce > Settings

Payment settings page in WooCommerce

If you haven’t already enabled PayPal standard, enable it and click the corresponding set up/manage button.

Step 2: Enable the PayPal sandbox checkbox

Now if you scroll toward the end of the page, under API credentials, you will be able to view fields to enter Sandbox API username, password, and signature.

enable paypal sandbox

Now if you scroll toward the end of the page, under API credentials, you will be able to view fields to enter Sandbox API username, password, and signature.

Enter sandbox credentials

Step 3: Login to PayPal

If you already have a PayPal account, you can obtain this data from the PayPal developer account by logging in to it. Else you can create a PayPal account right away to get the data.

Once you log in to your PayPal dashboard make sure the credentials menu is set to sandbox mode.

Turn on PayPal sandbox mode

Step 4: Open the Accounts tab from the sidebar

Spot the business account and click the view/edit button corresponding to it.

view sandbox credentials

Now from the opening pop-up, you can find the API credentials required for creating a sandbox account.

sandbox API credentials

Copy the user name, password, and signature paste them in the corresponding fields within WooCommerce.

Finally, click the Save changes button to finish setting up your PayPal sandbox account.

How to Set up PayPal Standard in WooCommerce?

Follow the below steps to enable PayPal standard in WooCommerce.

Step 1: Navigate to WooCommerce > Settings > Payments from your WordPress dashboard

Payment settings page in WooCommerce

Click the Manage button across PayPal standard. It will open a new page with options to configure.

Step 2: Enable PayPal standard and configure the rest of the settings

Once you enable the checkbox, you can give a title and description for how the PayPal checkout should appear on the front-end.

Enable PayPal standard

Within the PayPal email field, you can enter the email associated with your PayPal account. If you don’t already have an account you can create one by visiting the PayPal site.

Step 3: Advanced options

PayPal standard advanced settings

PayPal Sandbox – The sandbox mode creates a testing environment using which you can make test payments. There is a section dedicated to helping you learn how to make sandbox mode work.

Debug logs – By enabling logs you can make debugging easy.

IPN email notifications – Here you can enable instant payment notifications and automatically get notified of events related to PayPal transactions (chargebacks, refunds, cancellations) via your email.

Receiver email – Here you can give the email address to which the notifications should be sent.

Invoice prefix – Here you can add a prefix for your invoice numbers. If you use your PayPal account for multiple stores, you will have to add a unique prefix as PayPal won’t allow orders having the same invoice number.

Step 4: Generate PayPal identity token

The PayPal Identity Token is used to verify payments without using PayPal’s Instant Payment Notification (IPN). This allows customers to track their payment process in a secure channel.

Prior to generating a PayPal identity token you need to create an auto-return URL that brings your buyers back to your website immediately after completing a payment.

For this, you need to go to the PayPal settings and navigate to website payments in the dashboard.

Click the Update button across API access.

On the opening page, add the auto-return URL.

Auto-return URL field

​​Now copy it and paste it into WooCommerce PayPal identity token field.

Step 5: Get live API credentials

Here you can add all the API credentials for your PayPal live account. To obtain them you can go to your PayPal dashboard and then Website Payments under the Products & Services sidebar menu. Then, click “Update” on API Access.

Next, scroll down to “NVP/SOAP Integration (Classic)” heading and click “Manage API credentials”.

Manage API credentials

Now you will be able to find your credentials. You can copy and paste them into the required fields within WooCommerce.

fields to put live API credentials in WooCommerce

From the WooCommerce version 5.5.0 released on 2021-07-13 onwards, new WooCommerce installs will not load PayPal standard by default. Thus you will need to add a third-party PayPal plugin to your site to enable it.

Also Read: How to fix Unpaid Order Cancelled – Time Limit Reached error in WooCommerce?

Conclusion

As WooCommerce won’t include PayPal by default within it in new installs, it’s important to find the right extension that will help you integrate it with WooCommerce. Hope this article helps you do that easily.

We also have an article about how to enable PayPal pay later on WooCommerce.

Article by

Associate Product Manager @ WebToffee

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