Lesson 40. Shippings & Payments — Setting up PayPal in CS-Cart

Today we are going to explain how to set up one of the most popular payment systems in the world — PayPal. This is a very important step in the web store building.

To accept payments through PayPal in your shopping software, you need PayPal business account. So, we go to the PayPal official website, click Sign Up, and select to create Business Account.

After creating Business Account we return to the Admin Panel of CS-Cart.

The first thing that we need to do is to check if the PayPal add-on is installed, and properly configured.

On the settings page, tick the Override customer info checkbox, if you want to replace customer information in the order details with the data sent by PayPal via Instant Payment Notifications.

On the PayPal order status conversion map we can choose which status in your store corresponds to each transaction status sent by PayPal via IPN. Just select a corresponding status from the drop-down list. And an example, to explain this complicated system, the following record means that when PayPal sends an IPN that marks the transaction as Completed, the corresponding order in your store will get the Processed status.

Then we can select a separate status for a partial refund. This is done to prevent treating full and partial refunds as the same thing. So, according to the map, full refund leads to the canceled order status, while partial refund doesn’t change the status.

Add a PayPal logo. PayPal places your logo image at the top of the cart review area. Save changes to finish.

Now, we go to Administration → Payment Methods of the e-commerce shopping cart software to add a PayPal payment method. Click the Plus button. Enter the appropriate name. In the Processor section select the desired PayPal gateway. For example, ordinary PayPal. The template setting becomes unavailable, and that is okay. Each processor has its own unique template. Change Payment category to Internet Payments. We will skip other settings as unimportant and switch to the Configure tab.

Here, we select the currency of our PayPal account. This currency must exist in your store and, ideally, it should be your primary currency. That is because prices are always converted to PayPal currency according to the rates you specified, before being sent to PayPal.

Optionally make up the order prefix for PayPal orders. Using the prefix allows to prevent duplicate invoice IDs when you use the same PayPal account to accept payments from several websites.

The Initial order status is the status that all orders with a PayPal payment method get this status until the response from PayPal, an IPN message arrives or a customer returns to the store via a link on the PayPal site.

To add the PayPal method successfully you need to fill technical details.

Account is the email address of your PayPal account.

Name of the item is the value of the Pay for field, displayed on PayPal web page during the payment. For example, My shop.

And finally the Test/Live mode setting. Select Live if you’re ready to accept payments through this method. You can use the Test mode to see how the payment method works. But this mode doesn’t work with live PayPal accounts. For testing you’ll need to use test accounts from PayPal Sandbox. Click Create to add a new payment method to the shopping cart software system. By the way, you can also setup auto return for customers from your PayPal account.

This is how we add PayPal to CS-Cart e-shop software.