Yes, even if you don’t have an US PayPal account you can have your customers checkout and pay with their Visa or other cards.
We all know that WooCommerce is a one of the best e-commerce add-ons when it comes to WordPress, or even the best, many would say. It doesn’t lack in anything. It integrates with almost all payment gateways out there and is flexible enough to integrate any other payment gateway through hooks and APIs. Great.
But we are not here to talk how great WooCommerce is. Instead, we will discuss how to have your customers pay for your goods or services with their credit card without too much hustle.
I know that many people were simply frustrated few years back since this feature was missing, but today and for some time now, PayPal offers this nice little feature within their refurbished service of an old “PayPal Express checkout”, which today is called “PayPal Checkout”.
In their own words it is stated that: “The new PayPal Checkout, now with Smart Payment Buttons, offers payment options that make it easy for shoppers to pay the way they want – without leaving your website. ” (PayPal, 2019)
You can read more about the service here: PayPal Checkout
1. Requirements
To use this service you would need to own a legit PayPal business account. If you have one already, that’s great, and if do not then feel free to create one. It is allowed for everyone to have one personal and one business PayPal account under the same name, but with different email address.
The second thing you need is a properly configured WooCommerce plugin and additional plugin which enables this feature: WooCommerce PayPal Checkout Gateway plugin.
The plugin has some good and bad reviews. For me it works as advertised. For some people it doesn’t. I don’t know why, but many people never realize that the source of their WordPress issues might lie in their server setup. Some cheap hosting environments might not be a good fit if you have a webshop or anything more serious than a blog.
I would also suggest that once you activate the plugin, to disable the built in PayPal Standard gateway. Check the image below:
After that, you are good to go.
2. Setup process
To setup this plugin, you would have to copy your merchant API credentials from your PayPal business account and add them where appropriate within the settings. You can find your API credentials under Settings > My Selling Tools > API access.
Live API certificate is not important if you use Live API signature.
Once you set it all up to your liking, click Save, and your webshop should instantaneously have a credit card payment option for your customers.
That’s it. You don’t have to do anything else.
If you want to check if it is working, then you should setup and test the whole thing in a sandbox.
Cheers.
