How To Set Up PayPal Website Payments Standard

PHPurchase makes it easy to sell your products and services with PayPal using Website Payments Standard.  There is no limit to what you can sell. You can sell digital products, physical products that require shipping, or services. There are just a few steps you need to follow to make sure everything runs smoothly.

Configure Your PayPal Email Address

Log into your WordPress Admin Panel and navigate to the “Settings” tab of PHPurchase. Scroll down and enter in your PayPal settings. There are three fields you will want to complete.

PayPal Email Address: This is the email address of your PayPal seller account

Shopping URL: This is the URL to the main page of your store. PayPal customers will be directed to this page if they click “continue shopping” from the PayPal website.

Return URL: This is the page on your website where your PayPal buyers will be sent AFTER they have successfully purchased your products. This is where you can display a special message or instructions to your customers who pay with PayPal.  The return URL field is highlighted below.

Create A PayPal Thank You Page

Create a page on your website to display a special “thank you” message to your PayPal customers. You may wish to include any instructions or additional information you wish to share with your customers who pay with PayPal. We suggest creating this page as a sub-page of the “Store” page which is created for you when you install PHPurchase.

NOTE: Please do not rename the “Store” page or any of the other pages that PHPurchase creates. Read the help article for more information about the store pages created by PHPurchase.

Turn on Auto-Return In Your PayPal Account

PHPurchase integrates with PayPal via Website Payements Standard. Your customers will shop on your website, add products to your PHPurchase shopping cart, and then, when it’s time to pay, they will be transferred over to PayPal to securely handle the financial transaction. After a successful payment, PayPal will send your customer back to your website where you can display a special thank you to your PayPal buyers.

To configure PayPal to send your customers back to your site you need to turn on the Auto-Return feature in your PayPal seller account.

1. Log into your PayPal account and click the “Profile” link
2. Under “Selling Preferences” click the “Website Payments Preferences” link
3. On the Website Payments Preferences page select the “on” radio button next to Auto Return. Scroll down to the bottom of the page and click the save button.

Turn On Instant Payment Notification

The last thing you need to do is turn on IPN. From your profile summary in your PayPal account:

1. Click on the Instant Payment Notification link
2. Click the “Edit Settings” button
3. Enter the permalink of the store/ipn page on your WordPress website into the Notification URL field in PayPal
4. Enable the “Receive IPN messages” radio button in PayPal
5. Click the “Save” button to save your changes

Enabling IPN tells PayPal to alert PHPurchase every time the process a sale for you. This causes the sale to be stored in the Orders panel in the PHPurchase admin.