To configure PayPal as your payment processor is quick and easy.  The only required information is your PayPal account payment email address.  The only prerequisite to using PayPal as your payment processor is that you must have a PayPal Business or Premiere account to accept web payments.

Configure your Store to use PayPal

1. If you are configuring a new store, please skip to step three
2. Click on Payment Methods in the left menu
3. Click on Add next to the PayPal payment method. If you do not have a PayPal account, click on the sign up link and create your account before proceeding.
   
   
4. The configuration options will appear:
   
5. Fill out the form and click Save

PayPal Email:

Enter your PayPal Business or Premere account email in to the PayPal Email field.  

MicroPayments Email:

Optionally, if you have a micropayments account you can enter that email too.  DPD will automatically use your micropayments account email for transactions less than $12 USD or £9.38 that qualify for the special micropayments rate.

Checkout Language:

PayPal will default to your locale when processing your buyers.  If you want to override this locale you can specify another country to have PayPal display in that countries language, etc.  This is useful if you are selling a product that targets another country- for example if you are in the USA and sell a product targeted at the French or German market.

Accept Pending Payments:

The last option is to accept pending payments.  Pending payments from PayPal are usually the result of currency conversions when your buyers are purchasing from a country that uses a different currency than the one selected for the website- for example if someone in Europe attempts to buy with Euros on a US Dollar product.   Pending payments will result in a pending page being shown to the buyer until the currency conversion can be confirmed through PayPal unless this item is checked. 

Also, uncleared echeck payments, if enabled in your PayPal account, can cause pending payments until the echeck clears, typically in 3-5 days.  Downloads from echeck payments will not be authorized until the payment clears unless this option is checked. 

Set up your PayPal Account

DPD automatically configures most PayPal features through variables passed with the transaction.   However, one item that we can not automatically configure is the character set that your IPN data is transferred to DPD in.   For DPD to work for buyers from all countries where buyer names, street names, cites, etc.  may contain special characters you must set PayPal to send IPN data in UTF-8 format.   This is becuase UTF-8 supports these special characters, and DPD is designed to read UTF-8 IPN data for maximum compatibility.

Follow the links below for instructions on how to setup your PayPal account to use UTF-8.

Solutions to Common PayPal Issues

Occasionally a vendor will have issues where downloads are not being automatically activated by PayPal.  We've identified some specific settings that may need to be adjusted and they are in the Troubleshooting PayPal Setup article linked below.

PayPal users with the new "sidebar" style profile:

Please see our PayPal Account Setup & Troubleshooting Guide.

PayPal users with the "classic" profile:

Please see our PayPal Account Setup & Troubleshooting Guide for the PayPal classic profile.