How to Accept PayPal Payments in WordPress (Best Option)

There are many ways to accept PayPal payments in WordPress, including Visa, Mastercard, Venmo, Discover, iDEAL, American Express, Bancontact, BLIK, Giropay, MyBank, or Przelewy24. However, most of them have a steep learning curve and take hours to set up.

If you want to sell eBooks, courses, and paid memberships on your website, you need ProfilePress. It’s an all-in-one plugin for building membership websites and selling content to your users. You can use it to set up one-time payment plans and recurring subscriptions for all your products.

The best part about using ProfilePress is that it will take you less than an hour to get up and running. In this article, I will guide you through the entire setup of accepting PayPal payments on a WordPress website.

How to Accept PayPal Payments in WordPress

Most WordPress plugins that allow you to accept PayPal payments on your website take a lot of time to set up. Most of them are very generic and come with a steep learning curve. Even if you want to set up a basic paid membership section on your website, using any of those plugins would take weeks.

This is why we came up with ProfilePress. It’s a plugin built for beginners; you need zero technical knowledge and don’t have to touch a single line of code.

Here are some of the things you can do with ProfilePress:

• Sell eBooks and courses that require a one-time payment.
• Sell monthly subscriptions for your courses.
• Sell monthly or annual subscriptions for your gated content (membership site).

In this article, you’ll learn how to create payment plans with ProfilePress. Once you know how simple and easy it is to set up payment plans in ProfilePress, you’ll be able to sell almost anything you want on your website.

How To Set Up PayPal in WordPress

Once you’ve installed ProfilePress on your WordPress site, you need to enable PayPal payments and connect your PayPal account.

First, navigate to the Addons section of ProfilePress settings:

Now, enable PayPal payments:

To do this, navigate to the Settings section of ProfilePress:

Now, go to the Payments tab and select the Payment Methods sub-tab:

Click the Configure button next to the PayPal payment method option:

You’ll now see this page:

You’ll need to enter the required details on this page to enable PayPal payments, such as Client ID and Secret.

You’ll need to create a PayPal app from their developer dashboard to complete the PayPal setup.

Visit the PayPal Developer platform and Log Into your PayPal account:

After logging in, select the Live tab:

Next, click the Create App button:

Give your app a name and click the Create App button:

Now, you’ll be able to see your new App’s Client ID and Secret. Click the Show link next to Secret to see the secret key:

Now, copy the Client ID and Secret and paste them into your ProfilePress PayPal configure page:

Now, copy the Webhook URL that you see on this page:

Return to your PayPal app’s configuration page, scroll down, and click the Add Webhook button. Then, enter the Webhook URL you copied:

Scroll down and click the Save button:

Now, copy the Webhook ID for your newly created webhook:

Paste the webhook ID in PayPal integration settings and click the Save Changes button:

Now, scroll down to Live App settings and enable the first four options if they aren’t already enabled:

Finally, Click the Enable checkbox and click Save Changes:

That’s it! Your website can now accept PayPal payments.

How To Create Payment Plans For Your WordPress Website

To give your audience the ability to purchase your products or membership via Payal in WordPress, you must create some payment plans first.

How To Create One-Time Payment Plans

One-time payment plans are for products such as eBooks that only require a single payment.

To create your first one-time payment plan, navigate to the Membership Plans section under ProfilePress:

Now click the Add New Plan button to create a new plan. This will take you to the Add Plan page:

Enter a name, description, and price for this payment plan:

Make sure your description is clear and explains what this plan offers. It will be displayed on the checkout page for this plan.

Once you’re done setting up your plan’s details, scroll down to the Subscription settings section. Then select One-time purchase as the Billing Frequency:

Now, click the Save Plan button to publish this plan.

How To Create a Recurring Payment Plan

A Recurring Payment plan allows you to create a subscription that gets charged regularly. If you want to charge a monthly membership for your premium content in WordPress, you’ll want to create a Recurring Payment Plan.

Navigate to the Membership Plans section of ProfilePress, then click the Add New Plan button to create a new plan:

Enter a name, description, and price for this new plan:

Remember, this will be a recurring plan, so explain that in the description.

Once you’re done customizing your plan’s details, scroll down to the bottom of the page to the Subscription Settings section:

• Billing Frequency: This is how often your customers will be charged. To create an annual membership where customers are charged every 12 months, you’d select Annually.
• Subscription Length: This lets you create plans that allow your customers to pay you in instalments. If you select a fixed number of charges, your customers will only be charged that many times. Leave it at Renew indefinitely to create a plan that charges your customers until they manually cancel.
• Sign-Up Fee: This lets you charge your customers a one-time fee when they purchase this plan. Think of it like a “setup fee.”
• Free Trial: This lets you offer a free trial to your customers before they are finally charged. If you choose seven days, your customers won’t be charged in the first seven days. They won’t be charged if they cancel their subscription before the trial ends.

Once you are done customizing the settings, click the Save Plan button to publish this plan.

IMPORTANT: Giving Users The Option To Checkout

When you create a new plan, ProfilePress generates a Checkout page for it. This is the page you’ll send your website visitors to let them purchase a plan. These pages are hidden and won’t be visible to your users unless you manually link to them.

To get the checkout links for plans you just created, navigate to the Membership Plans section of ProfilePress:

This is where you’ll see the links to the checkout pages of your payment plans:

If you open any of the links, you’ll see this page:

This page will let your customers checkout using PayPal. Link to this page from your pricing pages and your product pages to give your users the ability to checkout.

How To Customize Emails

ProfilePress sends emails to your customers for many different events, including when they place an order.

You can customize all these emails by going to the Emails tab under the Settings section of ProfilePress:

Here, you will see four tabs that allow you to customize all the emails that are sent.

The first tab, Account, lets you customize these emails:

• Account Welcome Email: The welcome email is sent to your users when they signup for your WordPress site.
• Password Reset Email: This email is sent when someone uses the “Forgot your password?” link on the login page. It contains the password reset link.
• New User Admin Notification: You receive this email whenever a new user registers on your website.

To customize an email, click the customize button (gear icon) next to them:

The first option you’ll see now lets you enable or disable the email you’re editing:

This page allows you to customize the Subject Line and the Message Body (Email Content) for the current email.

You can use any of these available placeholders in your subject line or your message body:

These placeholders will be replaced with their real values when they are sent. So, {{first_name}} will become John if the user’s name is John.

Scroll down and click the Save Changes button to save your customizations.

Orders Tab

• New Order Receipt: This email is sent to your customers when they place a new order. It contains an invoice and a summary of what they bought.
• Renewal Order Receipt: This email is sent when a subscription product gets renewed automatically.
• New Order Admin Notification: This is the email you’ll receive when someone places a new order on your website.

Subscription Tab

• Subscription Cancelled Notification: A confirmation email is sent to your customers when they cancel their subscription.
• Subscription Expired Notification: Sent when a customer’s subscription has expired and needs to be renewed manually.
• Subscription Completed Notification: This email is sent when a customer has paid the last installment of the payment plan. Only sent if you limit the number of payments for a subscription.
• Upcoming Renewal Reminder: Reminds the user that their card will be charged soon.
• Upcoming Expiration Reminder: Reminds the user that their subscription is about to expire.
• After Subscription Expired Notification: Sent when customer’s subscription has expired.

Settings Tab

This page houses all the settings for the emails that are sent:

• Admin Email Address: This is where Admin email notifications are sent.
• Sender Name: The name of your website or your name. It will be used when sending emails.
• Sender Email Address: The email address from which the emails will be sent.
• Content-Type: Do you want to send plan-text emails or HTML? If you don’t know the difference, leave it be.
• Email Template: Do you want to use a custom email template? Choose custom here.
• Customize Default Template button: This button will take you to the editor that lets you customize the default email template design and layout.

Creating Coupons For Payment Plans

If you are having a sale on your WordPress membership site, you should create a discount coupon code for your payment plans.

Visit the Coupons tab under the Membership Plans section of ProfilePress:

Then, click the Add New Coupon button. You’ll see this page:

Here’s what the fields do:

• Coupon Code: The coupon code your users will enter on the checkout page to avail of the discount.
• Description: Describe the coupon code.
• Discount: Select a fixed amount or a percentage if you’re running a site-wide sale.
• Coupon Application: Who’s allowed to use this coupon?

Once you’ve filled in the essential details for the coupon, scroll down to the Redemption Settings section:

• Membership Plans: Type the name and select the plans you want this coupon to apply to.
• Start Date: When does this coupon start working?
• End Date: When does this coupon stop working?
• Maximum Redemptions: How many times total can this coupon be redeemed?

Click the Save button to publish this coupon. It would go live right away if you left the start date blank or on the start date that you entered.

How To Manage Orders

To manage your website’s orders, visit the Orders section of ProfilePress:

This is where you can see all the orders that have been placed:

To make changes to an order, take your mouse over it, and you’ll see the actions available to you under its name:

How To Manage Subscriptions

To manage your website’s subscriptions, navigate to the Subscriptions section of ProfilePress. It’s right under the Orders section from above.

On this page, you’ll see all the current subscriptions on your website:

Order Management and My Account Page

To allow your website’s customers to manage their accounts and their active orders made via PayPal, you’ll need to set up the My Account page on your website. Read this quick tutorial on how to set it up.

Once you set up the My Account page, your users will see this page when they log into your website. They can manage their orders from the Orders section of this page:

And they can manage their subscriptions from the Subscriptions section of this page:

Start Accepting PayPal Payments in WordPress Today

If you’re thinking of accepting PayPal payments on your WordPress website, you need ProfilePress. It’s the easiest way to start accepting payments on your website. Whether you want to sell access to a course or an ebook or build a paid membership site, this ProfilePress has all the features you’ll need.

Every other plugin takes a lot of time to learn. You will need to spend at least a dozen hours setting everything up with other plugins. But with ProfilePress, you can do it within an hour if you follow this guide.

Ready to create a WordPress membership site? Get ProfilePress today!