This guide will help you to setup PayPal on your site to let your users pay their invoices online through their favorite payment platform!
Setup PayPal account
In order to use the PayPal Gateway add-on, you must first have a PayPal account. You can use a standard PayPal.com account. However, to let PayPal communicate with your site through IPNs, you will need a PayPal.com Business account. Once you have purchased the PayPal Gateway add-on, install it just like any other WordPress plugin. After it is installed and activated, go to Settings → WP Customer Area → Payments → PayPal, and enable the gateway:
Add your PayPal standard or business account email to WP Customer Area settings.
Setup PayPal IPN verification
IPN allows PayPal to communicate with your store, and mark transactions as complete, failed, etc. Normally you want IPN working, but occasionally it can cause issues. You can turn it off on by checking the box “Disable PayPal IPN verification”.
In order to add the WP Customer Area IPN listener to your PayPal account, you can follow the official PayPal’s IPN integration guide.
Note: PayPal IPN verification requires an SSL certificate. See our SSL FAQ for more information.
Setup PayPal test mode
If you’d like to test, you can check the box “Enable test mode. No payments will be processed.”. As said, when using this mode, no payments will be processed: it is useful to test your PayPal account behaviors. A PayPal.com Sandbox account will be required for this to work.
Setup PayPal page style
This step is optional, however, if you want to customize your PayPal checkout page, you can follow the official PayPal’s page styles documentation.
Job done!
Now that you have setup PayPal, you can create a new invoice with some items, assign it to yourself to try out the features, optionally enable the “test mode” in WP Customer Area payments settings, view the invoice on the frontend, click on Pay, and select PayPal.
Click on continue and you will then be redirected to PayPal’s checkout page to enter your credit cards numbers and pay the invoice online.
Debugging
If you are suspecting an issue, you can “enable error logging to a file” in order to get some useful pieces of information from the PayPal Gateway add-on. This file will be stored in /wp-content/customer-area/logs.