Ecwid supports PayPal Standard and PayPal Express Checkout solutions.
If you have sales related questions about setting up new PayPal service and would like to speak directly to a PayPal Product Specialist, call (1) 877-455-1481. If you have customer service related questions regarding an existing PayPal account and would like to speak directly to a PayPal Customer Service agent, call (1) 888-221-1161.
PayPal Standard
It's the most easiest to use and set up solution from PayPal. It also allows to pay by credit card without creating a PayPal account.
How to set it up
Ecwid Control Panel
- Go to the System settings → Payment page.
- Find the PayPal payment method.
- Click the "Account details" link in the Payment Processor column. A popup window will appear.
- Insert your PayPal account's email address(e.g. paypal@example.com) Save the changes.
- Enable this payment method and save the changes once again.
PayPal backend
- Log in to your PayPal account.
- Then please go to the "My account → Profile → More Options → Instant Payment Notification Preferences" page and make sure that "Message delivery" option is enabled. If it's disabled, then click "Edit settings" and select "Receive IPN messages (Enabled)". Ecwid sends the necessary value of the "IPN URL" in each request to PayPal. However PayPal requires to enter some value there. So please use the following URL: http://app.ecwid.com/paypalstandard/STOREID where STOREID is your actual Store ID. For example: http://app.ecwid.com/paypalstandard/1003
- Also we highly recommend to enable the "Auto Return" option. You can find it on the "Profile → More Options → Website Payment Preferences" page. Ecwid sends the necessary value of the "Return URL" in each request to PayPal, so you can put any URL there, for example: http://app.ecwid.com/paypalstandard/STOREID
- Set up the encoding preferences. Open the "Profile → More Options → Language Encoding" page. Press the "More Options" button. Then set "Encoding" to "UTF-8" and "Do you want to use the same encoding for data sent from PayPal to you (e.g., IPN, downloadable logs, emails)?" to "Yes". Save the changes.
- If you have Premier or Business PayPal account, then go to the "Profile → Shipping Calculations". (or "Shipping calculator"). If you don't have any shipping methods on this page, just skip this step.
- Then select the checkbox next to the shipping method for a specific currency. Click the "Edit" button.
- Set "Use the shipping fee in the transaction instead of my calculator's settings" to "Yes". Click the "Save Changes" button.
- Perform these steps for each shipping method set in your PayPal account.
Please make sure that you made all steps described above. Otherwise you may have some issues with your PayPal orders.
If you have any questions about PayPal or if some steps are unclear, feel free to ask your questions on our forum.
PayPal Express Checkout
It's more advanced solution by PayPal. It provides a alternate checkout process for your Ecwid store.
How to setup PayPal Express Checkout in Ecwid
- Log in to the Ecwid control panel.
- Go to the System Settings → Payment → PayPal Express Checkout page.
- Fill all the necessary fields: API Username, API Password and Signature. You can get them from PayPal.
- Save the changes.
How to generate an PayPal API signature
Have you generate an API certificate or a signature before?
- If no, you need to generate a signature. Use this instruction: cms.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/?cmd=_render-content&content_ID=developer/e_howto_api_ECAPICredentials or this one: www.x.com/developers/community/blogs/ppmacole/retrieving-your-api-credentials
- If yes, then there are two possible options:
- You generated the API signature but cannot find it in the PayPal backend. In this case you just need to grab it using the instruction I posted above and use it in the Ecwid backend.
- You generated the API certificate. Unfortunately, PayPal doesn't allow having an API signature and a certificate at the same time. So you should to remove the certificate and generate the signature instead. Attention: if you already use any shopping cart with your PayPal account and this cart uses an API certificate, the cart will not be able to process PayPal transactions. In this case you need to switch the cart to using a signature (PayPal recommends using a signature).
How PayPal Express Checkout works
- you add some products to the bag
- click "Checkout with PayPal"
- Ecwid redirects you to the PayPal site
- you sign in with the PayPal account or create a new one
- PayPal redirects you back to Ecwid
- Ecwid creates a new profile based on information from PayPal and shows the last checkout page
- you review your order, change the shipping method if necessary and press "Submit order" button
- Ecwid sends request to PayPal in background, PayPal charges your credit card.
FAQ and Troubleshooting
Can my customers pay by credit card without creating or using a PayPal account ?
PayPal Standard and PayPal Express Checkout options allow to pay by credit card without a PayPal account. If you use PayPal, but it still asks your customers to log in, you should check the settings of your PayPal account. Please refer to these posts for the detailed instructions:
Can I use Ecwid with PayPal if I have a Personal account?
Yes, if you have a Personal account, it will work with Ecwid just well. Use the "PayPal Standard" payment option.
I see a sale in the Paypal backend, but it isn't showing in Ecwid
If you see any order in PayPal and don't see it in Ecwid, first of all make sure that your PayPal module is set up properly and all the steps from this instruction have been carried out: PayPal - How to set it up. Please pay particular attention to IPN messages - they must be enabled.
If all PayPal settings are correct, open the the "IPN History" page in your PayPal backend and check it for errors or failed IPN messages. If you have any failed messages related to the missing orders there, try to re-send them:
- Log in to your PayPal account and hover your mouse over "History".
- Click on "IPN history" from the menu.
- On the Instant Payment Notification history page select "All (Last N days)".
- Click "Search".
- Then mark the messages that need to be resent and click "Resend selected".
If all above doesn't help, please report the issue to our bug-tracker and we will investigate the issue further.
A customer has paid via PayPal, but in the Ecwid control panel the order status is Queued instead of Accepted
If an order is successfully placed and you have fully charged the customer for it, it should get the "Accepted" status. The "Queued" status means that the order is pending or it has been placed, but the money has not been transferred to your account yet. There are 3 main reasons why some PayPal order gets Queued status instead of Accepted one.
PayPal has informed us that the payment is pending, i.e. you actually haven't got the money yet
Here is the list of possible pending reasons:
- address: The payment is pending because your customer has not included a confirmed shipping address and your Payment Receiving Preferences is set to allow you to manually accept or deny each of these payments. To change your preferences, go to the Preferences section of your Profile.
- authorization: You set the payment action to Authorization and have not captured funds yet.
- echeck: The payment is pending because it was made by an eCheck that has not been cleared yet.
- intl: The payment is pending because you hold a non-U.S. account and do not have a withdrawal mechanism. You should manually accept or deny this payment from your Account Overview.
- multi-currency: You do not have a balance in the currency sent, and you do not have your Payment Receiving Preferences set to automatically convert and accept this payment. You should manually accept or deny this payment.
- order: You set the payment action to Order and have not captured funds yet.
- paymentreview: The payment is pending while it is being reviewed by PayPal for risk.
- unilateral: The payment is pending because it was made to an email address that has not been registered or confirmed yet.
- upgrade: The payment is pending because it has been made via credit card and you should upgrade your account to Business or Premier status in order to receive the funds. Upgrade can also mean that you have reached the monthly limit for transactions on your account.
- verify: The payment is pending because you have not been verified yet. You should verify your account first, and after that you will be able to accept this payment.
- other: The payment is pending for some reason different fromn those listed above. For more information contact PayPal Customer Service.
The most frequent reason of all above is that a payment has been made by an eCheck that has not been cleared yet. After an eCheck is cleared (usually it takes 3-5 days), the order status will be changed to Accepted automatically.
PayPal had some problems on its side
When a payment is made, PayPal sends a IPN (instant payment notification) message to Ecwid with the payment details. Ecwid verifies this IPN message and if everything are OK, it updates the order status. If for some reasons (due to an error or a downtime) the PayPal server hasn't answered to our request to verify the transaction (i.e. we don't know if the IPN message has been legit or not), the order status will be set to Queued.
Ecwid's internal anti-fraud mechanism has found something suspicious
Ecwid has an internal mechanism that checks PayPal orders for possible issues/cheats. It means that for example if somebody tries to pay less than required (i.e. less than the actual order total) via PayPal, Ecwid will prevent this and set the order status to "Queued" instead of "Accepted".
So, the main rule is if your PayPal order gets the "Queued" status instead of "Accepted" one, you should carefully check this order in the PayPal backend for possible issues.
If you have the "Queued" PayPal order, but still don't know why it has got this status, please create a new ticket in our bug-tracker and post the following information: 1) your Store ID 2) the ID of the Queued order.
I get the "Cannot proceed with checkout because of an internal error. Please contact the website administrator." error
Usually, such a message appears when some PayPal Express Checkout credentials are missing or incorrect.
- Check if all PayPal fields are filled in.
- Please check again if the credentials you use are valid and for the live account.
If after these steps you still get this error, let us know.
I get the "We cannot process this transaction because there is a problem with the PayPal email address supplied by the seller." error
If your customers see the error saying:
We cannot process this transaction because there is a problem with the PayPal email address supplied by the seller. Please contact the seller to resolve the problem. If this payment is for an eBay listing, you can contact the seller via the "Ask Seller a Question" link on the listing page. When you have the correct email address, payment can be made at www.paypal.com.
as soon as they proceed to the PayPal when placing orders in your store, then most probably you have a misconfigured PayPal payment method in your Ecwid control panel → System Settings → Payment.
Please, check the settings of your PayPal payment method and make sure that the email address you use there is exactly the same one you use to log in to your merchant account in PayPal. The best way to correctly set it up is to copy the email address from the PayPal page after logging in and paste it into the settings of your PayPal payment method in Ecwid control panel.
I get the "Unable to process payment" error
If you get this error:
Unable to process payment. Please contact the merchant as the shipping address provided by the merchant is invalid,
and the merchant has requested that your order must be shipped to that address.
then it means that your customer specifies an invalid, non-existing shipping address. In order to solve the problem, your customer should enter the correct shipping address during checkout.
As a workaround you can enable the "Allow customers to change their shipping address on PayPal site" option on the "Payment → PayPal settings" page. If you enable this option, a customer will not see the error, but will be prompted to enter a new valid shipping address instead of the incorrect one. The drawback of this workaround is that a customer can enter one shipping address in your Ecwid store and another one on PayPal side.
I get the "The seller accepts encrypted website payments only. You cannot pay the seller through un-encrypted buttons. Please contact your seller for more details." error
In order to fix this problem you should disable the "Block Non-encrypted Website Payment" option in your PayPal backend.
- Log in to your PayPal account.
- Click the Profile subtab.
- In the Selling Preferences column, click the Website Payment Preferences link.
- Scroll down to the Encrypted Website Payments section.
- Next to the "Block Non-encrypted Website Payment label", select the "Off" radio button.
- Scroll to the bottom of the page, and click the Save button.
The 'Encrypted Website Payments' option is used when you insert the HTML code of your PayPal button to your site page. Since anybody can modify this button code and change for example an item price, it is possible to encrypt the button code using a special certificate.
Since in Ecwid a visitor cannot modify the "button code", this option isn't necessary and should be disabled.
How can I use single Paypal account for multiple Ecwid stores?
It's possible to link multiple Ecwid stores to one Paypal account. Ecwid takes care about proper values of return URLs and IPN URLs for each storefront, all you need to do is properly set up your merchant account in the PayPal backend as described above. Particularly, pay attention to the 'Auto return' option - it should be enabled. As for the 'Return URL' field, Ecwid will pass the correct URL along with each payment request, so that each customer will be eventually returned to the site where he started the checkout. If some Return URL is specified in Paypal account settings, the Return URL that is provided by the store will override what was specified in the profile settings. Thus you can put any URL there, for example: http://app.ecwid.com/paypalstandard/STOREID
