Adding PayPal as a payment method

30 Nov 1999

Expand your users payment options with the addition of PayPal to your site both for one off and recurring payments. Once you have your charity’s PayPal account ready, follow these steps to enable PayPal as a payment option for your users.

What is it?

PayPal is a secondary and optional payment solution that can be added to the site if you desire.

Who is it most useful for?

Donors who make donations on the platform.

What are the benefits of it?

It provides an alternative option for making donations. Since some donors might prefer to use their PayPal account for donations, enabling PayPal can potentially increase the likelihood of receiving donations.

REST or SOAP/NVP?

PayPal has two API’s available for payments, SOAP/NVP or REST. The API you will want to use will depend on if your charity intends to use PayPal for only one off payments or recurring as well.

The SOAP/NVP API PayPal provides allows for only one off payments in PayPal. The required API details are:

  • Username
  • Password
  • Signature

PayPal’s REST API allows both one off payments and recurring payments via “Reference Transactions”. This requires an application process to have enabled on your PayPal account. Please refer to this support article to follow the application process. Once approved, you will need the follow REST API credentials:

  • Client ID
  • Secret

When you have your API credentials ready, submit a support ticket from the site you would like to enable PayPal on and please include the API you intend to use and if you intend to use recurring payments.

When this has been enabled for you, navigate to:

Platform setup > Payment Settings in the white middle navigation > Scroll down to the section titled PayPal Integration

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Enter your API credentials into the appropriate field based on the intended API type and save.

Where can I enable PayPal?

With your credentials now added, to enable PayPal on donation pages head to your page in your site management.

Classic Builder

If editing your page through the classic builder, click on the donation settings option (or crowdfunding settings option if editing a crowdfunding page) > When you see a series of tabs, click the Payment Settings tab > Scroll down to the Payment Methods Section.

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Click the checkbox labelled Enable PayPal donations and publish the page. 

Visual Builder

If editing your page via Visual Builder, click the volunteer_activism icon on the top right of your screen > In your settings panel, Click on the Payment tab > Expand the Payments options and toggle on PayPal and publish the page.

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The shop checkout, sponsored donation forms and registration forms will automatically have PayPal enabled once the ability to add API keys has been made available.

Reconciliation and Payouts

Unlike Stripe, PayPal will not payout your charity automatically on a recurring schedule and requires logging into the charity PayPal account and requesting any funds from PayPal, this will also mean Payouts and gateway fees are not reportable from within the Funraisin platform itself. You will be able to calculate platform fees as you can with credit card payments but the final net amount will not reflect the amount within PayPal once they have deducted their fees.

If you’d like further help please pop in a support ticket from your Funraisin admin and our team will assist you.