It is estimated at 87.5% of online buyers use PayPal. As an ecommerce business or a service provider, you can ill-afford to not offer PayPal as a payment option on your WordPress site.
We know what you are thinking. Payment processors and website integration give most businesses the jitters. They picture downtime, backend coding, trial and error, test orders and payment failures.
Not anymore. With WPForms, accepting PayPal on your WordPress site is as simple as copy pasting a few lines of code.
Regardless of whether you accept donations or have a product or service portfolio, WPForms has a PayPal Standard add-on that makes it effortless to integrate & collect PayPal payments on your site.
Collect PayPal Payments on your WordPress Site
Here’s a brief guide that grabs your hand and walks you through the entire process.
Step 1. Install WPForms
You cannot install the PayPal add-on without WPForms. So the first step is to install the plugin if you still haven’t done it.
Log on to WPForms, sign into your account and download the plugin.
Now upload it to your WordPress site. Activate the plugin, enter your license and verify it.
Now, you can choose from the hundreds of add-ons available in the WPForms repository. In this case, we are going to install the Standard PayPal Add-on.
Step 2. Install the PayPal Add-On
In the WordPress dashboard, look for WPForms on the left hand panel and click on Addons.
A list of the available add-ons should auto populate on the right hand side. If you do not see anything, click on Refresh Addons. Sometimes, it takes a while to load the Add-Ons that are available with your license plan.
Alternatively, you can enter ‘PayPal’ in the search box on the right hand corner. This will display all the PayPal Add-ons available with your plan. Look for the Standard PayPal Add-on and click on Install under it.
You will notice that the status changes to Active.
Step 3. Create a form
The next step is to integrate PayPal payments into a form. So, we are going to create a new form. You don’t necessarily need to create a new one if you already have an order form on your site. You can just edit it and integrate PayPal payments into it.
But for the sake of easy explanation in this article, we will create a new form.
WPForms comes with more than 100 prebuilt form templates that you can use. For instance, a donation form, contact form, surveys, registration, newsletter & request a quote, to name a few. You can select any one of these and customize it further, using the drag & drop form builder interface.
Just select from one of the elements in the builder, click on it, drag and drop it on to the form. Now click to get customization options.
As mentioned, we will build a new Billing form to accept a one-time PayPal payment. Select the Billing form template and edit it as explained. You can add or delete as many fields from the template as you wish.
For PayPal to work, there’s one mandatory field. That’s the items field. What is the service or the product that you are selling? Does it have any variations?
When you click on edit on the Items field, you are presented with the following choices.
- Single Item
- Multiple Item
- Checkbox Items (Multiple Choices)
- Dropdown Items
You will also see a Totals field, which displays a total amount for the customer. Then there’s Stripe Credit Card. Since we are using PayPal, this automatically disqualifies. So just ignore it.
Step 4. Connect it to PayPal
Click on Payments on the left hand panel and then click on PayPal Standard. Enable it in the checkbox.
You will need to fill some additional details to connect it to your PayPal account.
- Your PayPal email address
- Your Payment mode – Test Environment/Sandbox
- Payment Type – PayPal offers just two payment types. There’s products & services, and there’s donation.
- Cancel URL – If the customers don’t complete the payment or abandon the cart, they will be redirected to the cancel URL.
- Shipping – If you are selling physical products, the customer needs to submit a shipping address during checkout.
You will notice two additional checkboxes at the bottom of the form.
- Don’t ask buyer to include a note with payment – Some products need buyer inputs. For example, a customized dog collar might need the Pet’s name. This can be added as a note. If you do not need this option, you can disable it by selecting this checkbox.
- Conditional Logic – If you also want to offer Stripe Credit Card Payments along with PayPal, you can activate conditional logic. This allows the buyer to select one of the two payment processors during checkout. If you plan to use only PayPal, then you can just ignore this. Conditional logic can also be used to set specific rules when the buyer can use PayPal. For instance, some businesses may only offer PayPal payments on orders of a specific value. You can choose to do this with conditional logic.
When you are done customizing the form, click on Save.
Step 5. Test PayPal payments on the form
We have set everything up. If you followed the instructions clearly, you should have a working form with PayPal payments as an option. But, we will still go ahead and test it out.
In step 4, we spoke about the Test Environment. This PayPal feature allows you to test out dummy form submissions and payments.
Fill the form like a user on your site would, click on Submit and you will be redirected to the Test Environment Payment completion page. Don’t worry. You will not be charged for the test order. Just ensure that the order is completed successfully and you are redirected to your business website.
Check the Entries Page to know the payment status. If the payment has been completed successfully, you will notice that the status changes to Completed. Else, it shows Pending.
You can also abandon cart to check if the cancelled order url is set up correctly.
Closing thoughts
That wasn’t too hard was it? WPForms does the heavy lifting and takes guesswork & tech skills out of PayPal integration. We hope that our guide helps you set up and accept PayPal on your WordPress site.
