Accepting payments with PayPal on WooCommerce

Without a doubt PayPal is the most used payment processing service around today. At the time of writing this, PayPal accounts for 73.31% of Payment Processing services and is used on more than 760k domains. With such a significant market-share it’s hard to not accept PayPal. There are alternatives like Stripe, Square, or Authorize.net. All these options will accept and process payments from major credit card networks.

The fact that it’s so widely used means a lot of consumers already have a PayPal account setup. If you want your site to be one of the 760k websites that accept PayPal you can enable it in these simple steps. The PayPal standard version is included for use by default with WooCommerce. WooCommerce also allows you to easily setup PayPal Express Checkout, Braintree, PayPal Payments Pro, or PayPal Advanced.

How do I set PayPal up as my payment gateway?

In our example we will setup the standard version of PayPal. From your WooCommerce > Settings page, click on Checkout, and choose PayPal. Simply check the Enable PayPal standard box. You can also alter the Title and Description if you wish.

To ensure complete setup, you will need to enter your API credentials under the API tab, and save those settings.

More information about finding your API information is detailed at the link below.
https://developer.paypal.com/webapps/developer/docs/classic/api/apiCredentials/#creating-an-api-signature

It is necessary to enable Instant Payment Notifications (IPN) in your PayPal account. Instructions are here:
https://www.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=p/acc/ipn-info-outside