As mentioned, PayPal offers multiple payment methods. In the following steps we will go through how to get their most-used method available:
- Creating a PayPal seller account: The first thing that's needed to start selling through PayPal is a PayPal seller account. To create this, head over to http://www.paypal.com. On the home page, there is a big blue Sign Up for Free button as shown in the following screenshot:
After clicking on this button, you will be taken to the first step of the account creation wizard. Click on the Get Started button in the PayPal for business and nonprofits block and go through the form:
- Verifying your PayPal account: After you have successfully submitted the form, it is advised to verify your PayPal account by clicking on the Get verified link below the welcome message in the top of the screen, as shown in the following screenshot. This ensures that PayPal knows who you are and can safely handle your transactions. Not getting verified means you can have trouble accepting payments. After signing up and getting verified, you are ready for configuring PayPal Payments Standard in Magento!
A PayPal account looks like the following screenshot:
- Configuring Magento for PayPal payments: After going to System | Configuration | Payment Methods, click on the Configure button in the PayPal Payments Standard row. More input options will appear, the most important one being Email Associated with PayPal Merchant Account. Fill in your PayPal seller account's e-mail address there, and set the Enable this Solution drop-down menu to Yes. Now your Magento store is ready to accept payments through PayPal. The following screenshot shows what the input section, where you can input your e-mail address, looks like:
Besides the general payment configuration options Title and Sort Order, which are explained at the start of this chapter, another (not required) setting that can be found in the PayPal form is Payment Action: this is set to Sale by default, but can also be set to Authorization. Setting it to Authorization means that you will not receive money after the customer finishes his/her order, but instead you as the store owner will have to complete the transaction at a later time by performing a "capture" of the payment (either through PayPal's system or through invoicing in the Magento admin). We recommend that you leave this set to Sale unless you have a good reason for a deferred payment through the Authorization option.
Clicking on the Advanced Settings orange link displays some final setup options, all of which you are advised to leave to the default settings:
- Sandbox Mode: This specifies whether or not you are using PayPal's testing grounds (sandbox) or the live merchant environment.
- Transfer Cart Line Items: If this is setting is set to Yes, Magento will transfer information about the products inside the order to PayPal, so you can see what was ordered from within PayPal.
- Debug Mode: This is primarily useful for somebody with technical expertise, for when detailed troubleshooting of the PayPal integration is necessary.
- Enable SSL verification: This specifies whether or not to check the integrity of the secure connection between PayPal and Magento.
In the following screenshot you can see what the basic and advanced settings for PayPal Payments Standard look like:
Remember to save the config after setting everything to the desired values. As a rule, it's best to save as soon as you're done with a certain section. After setting up PayPal, it will look like the following screenshot in your checkout:
Q1. What is the minimum amount of information needed to input into Magento in order to accept PayPal Payments Standard? Choose the right answer from the following options:
- Your PayPal merchant e-mail address, basic settings related to sort order, and authorization mode.
- Your PayPal merchant e-mail address and password, basic settings related to sort order, and authorization mode
- Your PayPal merchant e-mail address and password.
Saved credit card (saved CC) is Magento's way of allowing you to capture credit card payments out of the box. It should be noted that this payment method is not a particularly good way of offering credit card payments on your website. In fact, we advise you to look for other options if possible. The main drawbacks of the saved CC payment method in Magento are as follows:
- It saves your customer's credit card details inside your own system, which places the burden of securing that data on your shoulders. You should go in for a secure hosting provider because a store always handles private customer data, but credit card details are more sensitive than regular customer data. Storing credit card details also means you will have to comply with e-commerce industry standards for credit card processing (called PCI compliance). Attaining PCI compliance is not easy.
- The saved CC payment method saves the credit card details inside Magento, but no payment is made at that time. You have to manually process the payment through some other credit card payment processor.
A more usual way of accepting credit cards is by working with a payment service provider (PSP). Payment service providers will be discussed in more detail toward the end of this chapter. Authorize.net is a payment service provider integrated by default into Magento, which can be used to accept credit cards without having the issues previously outlined. The payment service provider will receive the money and transfer it to you automatically, and the customer's sensitive credit card data is handled and saved by the payment service provider as well.
A quick solution for shops that cannot arrange credit card payments through a payment service provider is naming the PayPal Standard payment option along the lines of "PayPal and credit card through PayPal". This works because customers can pay using their credit card through PayPal Standard as well, although it isn't as quick or easy to use as a dedicated credit card payment method.
All that having been said, if you want to go ahead with saved CC payments, these are the specific configuration options:
- Credit Card Types: This selects the credit cards for which you will process payments from here.
- Request Card Security Code: This sets whether or not Magento will ask for the credit card's security code. It is recommended to set this to Yes as it makes fraud a little harder.
- 3D Secure Card Validation: 3D Secure is an additional security layer where the customer has to supply his/her credit card password before being able to complete a purchase successfully. If you are experiencing a lot of fraud, it is but wise to set this to Yes.
Enabling this payment method and saving the configuration results in the following payment method display in the checkout:
The check / money order payment method has two configuration inputs:
- Make Check Payable to: This will take the name of the company that will receive the money for the order being placed.
- Send Check to: This will specify where the check needs to be sent for processing.
These are displayed in the following screenshot. Other than capturing the customer's order, Magento will not automatically arrange anything relating to the payment of the check / money order:
Setting this payment method results in the following display in your store's checkout process:
As an exercise in enabling a simple payment method, enable the check / money order payment method. It may be already enabled in your store if you have a completely default installation. Set it up so that it is only shown to U.S. customers through the Payment from Applicable Countries input field. After you are done, verify that it's done correctly by purchasing two products in two separate checkouts in your test store: one with the country selected as U.S. and one with the country as Belgium. In the latter checkout, you should not see the check / money order payment method, of course!
There is only one specific field to configure for the bank transfer payment method, and that's called Instructions. In this field, you should enter all relevant bank account details that your customer needs to transfer money to you.
Setting the bank transfer to active results in the following payment display:
After setting up the bank transfer settings, when you check out it is shown as follows:
This payment method also has only one specific setting called Instruction . Here you should list any information related to the cash on delivery payment, for instance, how your customer can pay (cash, debit card, credit card, and so on) when the goods are delivered. Often the delivery company charges extra for performing a cash on delivery shipment, and because of that often store owners charge customers extra for the cash on delivery shipment option as well. Unfortunately, a surcharge for cash on delivery is not possible through the default cash on delivery payment option in Magento, but there is a free module on MagentoConnect that does offer this. It's located at http://www.magentocommerce.com/magento-connect/cashondelivery.html.
Activating cash on delivery results in a payment selection as follows in the checkout:
There are no specific input fields in the admin for purchase orders, just the general payment configuration fields that were discussed at the start of this section. This also implies that Magento will just save the order information when a customer chooses Purchase Order as their payment method; any additional actions will need to be performed by the store owner. Activating the purchase order payment method results in the screen shown, where it can be seen that the customer can input their purchase order number:
From the preceding screenshot it should be clear that most of the payment methods that are offered by Magento out of the box require manual processing to receive an actual payment and safely fulfill the order. The exceptions are the payment gateways PayPal Payflow Pro and Authorize.net, and the PayPal Payments Standard payment method. For stores that process multiple orders daily, the manual payment methods offered by Magento become cumbersome quickly.