PayPal is a place where people who frequently spend money online can park their money until they need to spend it. Accepting money online via PayPal is very common, and some users prefer to spend money on PayPal rather than share their credit card details with an unknown site. PayPal can also work for people who don't have a PayPal account and want to use a credit card.
You need to sign up for a PayPal account at https://www.paypal.com/signup/account.
There are quite a few steps to setting up PayPal. Luckily, not all of them are required. The first part will allow you to capture payments immediately. In order to configure the PayPal gateway, go through the following steps:
- From the WordPress admin, go to WooCommerce | Settings | Checkout. From here, you can access all of the WooCommerce payment options.
- Click on PayPal.
- Check Enable PayPal standard:
- You must fill out the PayPal Email field.
- Scroll down and click on Save changes.
At this point, you can capture payments. With a few extra settings filled in, you can process refunds from within WooCommerce, which is a big time saver.
- Scroll down to API Credentials:
- Follow the link to the PayPal website to get your API information.
- Fill out API Username, API Password, and API Signature.
- Click on Save changes.
Note
Some web hosts have problems with the way PayPal notifies the store of a successful transaction, which is called Instant Payment Notification (IPN). If you are seeing a payment marked as complete in PayPal but not in WooCommerce, then you can fill in the PayPal Identity Token field. This will allow PayPal to use a different protocol for notifying your site.
There are some people who will only use PayPal and others who refuse to use PayPal altogether. Many stores handle this by providing PayPal as well as one other gateway to handle credit cards.
The PayPal gateway included in WooCommerce is known as PayPal standard. Note, however, that it doesn't include the advanced functionality included with some PayPal business accounts. If you need that functionality, there are several PayPal extensions available on WooThemes.com.