How to update the PayPal Payment Gateway in MemberPress
In this video you will learn how to update your PayPal Standard payment method
If you are already using PayPal Standard as your payment gateway on your MemberPress site you will first notice a PayPal notification from your dashboard for upgrading the PayPal account.
It is highly important to mention that this upgrade will add an enhanced customer checkout process and also give you additional security benefits, so let's start and see what should be done for accomplishing this.
During the upgrade process you will go through the PayPal onboarding process. They have a help document that goes over what that process looks like and what options are available in what countries.
The first thing you will see on your dashboard will be a notification window that will look like the following
where you should click on the button for ' Upgrade PayPal Standard to fix this error' which will redirect you further to the MemberPress payments section from your dashboard.
A note that for making this change you can also access this page by navigating to the MemberPress → Settings → Payments tab from the admin area of your site
For upgrading your gateway, you will need to click the blue button for 'Upgrade to new PayPal Commerce Platform' which will prompt a popup message for verifying this and for following the wizard further.
This will reveal some additional options for connecting your Live and Sandbox account, so if your site is Live and you want to collect real payments you will need to choose the Connect Live option, otherwise, if you choose the Connect Sandbox option you will be able to use it for testing which will also take you out from the Live mode and you won't be able to accept real payments.
For using a Live mode, once you click on the appropriate button a new window will pop up where you should add an email for your existing PayPal account.
Be sure to enter the email account of the PayPal that you are using on your site and not a new or a different one and prevent any possible confusion for you that might come up from different payments on different accounts.
Depending on how your PayPal account is set up it could happen that you see this screen first where you will want to use your existing business account and click continue.
During this process if you see a screen like this for Fraud protection you are not required to enable anything. You can go to your PayPal settings and enable Fraud protection later when you want.
You can just click I'll do this later and move on to the process.
Once you add your PayPal email address and a password you will get a notification window asking to connect your PayPal account with your site and verifying that, after which a successful connection message will come up.
Don't forget to press the Update options from the MemberPress → Settings → Payments page to make sure that everything you have done is saved.
Note: It could happen that you notice the window below telling you that your connection is being processed, and if this message stays there for more than 5 minutes you should disconnect and retry. If your second attempt does not work. Rollback to PayPal standard, save your MemberPress settings and contact support.
That would be it and you could check how this new upgrade is looking now on the front of your site.
How it Looks on the Front End
If you open some of your created Membership registration pages and choose PayPal as your payment option you will be redirected to PayPal for entering your email for finishing the purchase, where if you click next on the price you will see some more info about what you are buying and also tells you more about the time interval when this charge will occur if, for example, a subscription is recurring. As a final step, you could choose how you want to pay and verify that.
After submitting the payment you will be redirected to a Thank you page as a confirmation that everything finishes correctly.
Now, if you go back to your MemberPress Payments page on your site you'll also notice a new button for 'Enable smart payments buttons' so after you check it and save these changes if you check the registration page and choose the PayPal option again, you will see these buttons there where you could choose from various options that you could pay.
Clicking each of the available buttons will bring up that same window and the process for each are all similar.
Note: If some of the users are using IPN Forwarder plugin, please do not delete /remove this plugin since you will still need it in order to keep your old subscriptions ( if there are still some active ones), however, it will not have any function related to your new subscriptions
PayPal e-commerce integration s currently available in the following countries:
Australia
Belgium
Bulgaria
Canada
Cyprus
Czech Republic
Denmark
Estonia
Finland
France
Germany
Greece
Hungary
Italy
Latvia
Liechtenstein
Lithuania
Luxembourg
Malta
Netherlands
Norway
Poland
Portugal
Slovakia
Slovenia
Spain
Sweden
United Kingdom
United States
A note that for Connecting to Sandbox Account you will need to repeat the steps from above and choose the option for Connect Sandbox from the Memberpress Payments page.
When it comes to creating a PayPal Payments Pro account you will need to add SSN so you should check https://www.paypal.com/sg/smarthelp/article/what-ssn-should-i-use-for-a-sandbox-test-account-ts1048