how to integrate paypal on website

How To Integrate PayPal Into My Website (WordPress, Wix, and Others)5 min read

November 18, 2021

Most people have a PayPal account these days, so offering the option on your site to checkout using PayPal could help make your potential customers feel safe and comfortable making a purchase on your website.

But a question we get asked a lot is, “How can I integrate PayPal into my website?”

You can integrate PayPal into your website by adding a single button or by integrating it with a shopping cart.

Which method you choose depends on what you’re selling and how complex your checkout process is. Read further for how-to steps or contact us for assistance.

Simple Method: How To Put a PayPal Button On Any Website

If you sell a very small number of products, then a simple PayPal button might be all you need on your website. In a nutshell, this process simply involves copying some code from PayPal onto your website. Here’s how to do that.

  1. Go to paypal.com/buttons and choose an appropriate button (Buy Now, Add To Cart, Subscribe, etc)
  2. Follow the prompts to create a custom button in PayPal
  3. When you’re finished creating the button, copy the HTML code that PayPal provides.
  4. Paste the code on your website wherever you want people to be able to buy a product or add it to the cart.

Integrate PayPal Into WooCommerce (on WordPress)

If you already have a store built in WordPress that uses WooCommerce to sell products, you can add PayPal as a payment option by using the PayPal Payments plugin for WooCommerce. Here’s how to do that.

  1. Download and install the WooCommerce PayPal Payments plugin here on WooCommerce’s site, or in WordPress by going to Plugins -> Add and searching for “WooCommerce PayPal Payments”
  2. Once the plugin is installed, in WordPress go to WooCommerce -> Settings
  3. Click the Payments tab and turn on the switch beside “PayPal” (not PayPal Standard).
  4. Click the PayPal Checkout tab and follow the prompts to connect your PayPal account (you may be prompted to sign into PayPal if you’re not already signed in)
  5. When the connection to PayPal is complete, check the box for “Enable the PayPal Gateway”

Those are the foundational steps that will get you started with integrating PayPal into WooCommerce. Additional steps may be required depending on how much you want to customize the checkout process.

How To Add PayPal To Wix

If your website is built on Wix, you can either add a button (or several buttons) throughout the site, or you can add PayPal as a payment processor if you have a Wix store.

To add a PayPal button, you can either follow the Simple Method explained earlier and paste the HTML code from PayPal into an HTML element in Wix, or you can use the PayPal button element in the Wix editor (Click Add -> More -> PayPal Buttons) and follow the prompts in Wix to set up the button.

To integrate PayPal into your Wix store, go to your dashboard in Wix and click the Accept Payments link. Then click the blue “Connect” button beside PayPal, and follow the prompts to sign in and complete the integration process.

Advanced Method: Custom Integration (Requires Help From A Developer)

If you have a very large e-commerce store with a complicated cart and checkout process, the simple methods described above might not be the right solution for you.

As an example, we have a client that sells hundreds of products and they partner with large companies to offer their employees discounts on their products. This means that their checkout process, while simple for users to navigate, is very complicated to develop and maintain and requires our experienced team of developers to keep it running smoothly without any major hiccups.

If your checkout process is very unique and much more complicated than most e-commerce stores – then the good news for you is that PayPal offers a more advanced “custom integration” option. This allows a web developer to customize your online store’s checkout process to include PayPal as a payment option.

If this sounds like you, then you’ll need to find an experienced developer or web development team to build the PayPal integration for you. We are very familiar with how to integrate PayPal payment processing into the custom checkout process, so we can help!

Why Bother With Integrating PayPal?

Now that you know how to integrate Paypal into your website, you may be second-guessing your decision to integrate because of complexities you hadn’t known about.

If that’s the case, it’s important to remember that giving PayPal as a payment option on your website can make your potential customers much more comfortable spending money on your website, especially if your brand is small and not widely known.

Scammy and insecure websites are unfortunately more popular than they should be and customers are becoming warier and warier of putting their payment information on websites if they’re not confident that it’s secure. Almost everyone knows about PayPal and considers them a secure third-party solution to paying for products, which means that offering PayPal as a checkout option could possibly increase your overall sales volume!

Help! What Do I Do Next?

If you know that the simple methods described above are not a fit for your more robust online store but you’re not sure where to go next to get help, our team can help!

Our web development team has extensive experience with payment integrations for both small and very large e-commerce stores. We’d love to help you with your e-commerce store too!