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PayPal Payments

Despite having more coverage, globally, even PayPal supports billing only in select currencies.  If you try to choose PayPal while having selected a currency that is not supported, the system will alert you of as much.

 

Setup

To set up, simply navigate to Business Center >> Setup >> Invoicing Config. Once there, click the Processor tab, select PayPal and put in your email address associated with your PayPal account:

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Client Experience

Instead of entering payment details in-app, like with the others, a button will whisk your customers off to PayPal to complete the transaction.  In the case of Offerings, this is a pop up window, like so:

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Trade-Offs

PayPal offers a few trade-offs from the other payment processors.  For one, one needn’t even have a PayPal account to get started: you can simply enter your email address.  Whenever you get your first payment this way, PayPal will let you know you’ve got money, and guide you through the steps to retrieve it (and set up your account in the process).

Your customers going to PayPal means they can pay in alternative ways to just a credit card, like bank transfers or with their PayPal balance.  Though not guaranteed, this opens up the possibility of you collecting on your invoices without being subject to the usual merchant processor fees.

(The flip side of this, of course, is that the activity of making the payment is all happening at the PayPal side of things, and thus there’s no way for you, as a merchant, to store information about their payment instruments for later payments.)

That also means that if you use Engagements to automatically invoice your clients, the payments will not automatically process. Your clients will need to manually pay each invoice.

 

Overall it works fine, both to allow your new clients to purchase your Offerings and your established clients to pay your invoices.  We recommend Stripe or Square over PayPal for the aforementioned reasons, but to all of those for whom those aren’t an option, PayPal’s got you covered!

 

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