Paypal¶

Paypal is available and popular worldwide. It doesn’t charge any subscription fee, and creating an account is very easy. That’s why we recommend it for starters in Flectra. It works as a seamless flow where the customer is routed to the Paypal website to register the payment.

Settings in Flectra¶

Credentials tab¶

Flectra needs your API Credentials to connect with your PayPal account, which comprise:

Email: your login email address in Paypal.
Merchant Account ID: the code of the merchant account used to identify your Paypal account.
PDT Identity Token: the key used to verify the authenticity of transactions.
Use IPN: whether you want to use Instant Payment Notification. Already checked, you don’t have to change it.

You can copy your credentials from your Paypal account and paste them into the related fields under the Credentials tab.

To retrieve the Merchant Account ID, log into your Paypal account and go to Account menu ‣ Account Settings ‣ Business information.

To set the PDT Identity Token, switch to developer mode and retrieve the token by following the configuration step Enable Payment Data Transfer (PDT).

Important

If you are trying Paypal as a test, using a Paypal Sandbox account, change the State to Test Mode. We recommend doing this on a test Flectra database rather than on your main database.

Fees tab¶

You can charge extra fees to your customers for paying with Paypal to cover the transaction fees Paypal charges you. Once redirected to Paypal, your customer sees an extra amount applied to the order amount.

To activate this, go to Paypal configuration’s Fees tab in Flectra and activate Add Extra Fees.

You can refer to Paypal Fees to set up fees.

Note

Traders in the EU are not allowed to charge extra fees for paying with credit cards.

Settings in Paypal¶

First, set up your Paypal account to build a seamless customer experience with Flectra.

Log into your PayPal account and open the account settings. Then, go to Account menu ‣ Account settings ‣ Website payments.

Enable Auto Return¶

The Auto Return feature automatically redirects your customers to Flectra once the payment is processed.

From the Website payments settings page, go to Website preferences ‣ Update ‣ Auto return for website payments and select On. Enter the address of your Flectra database (e.g., https://yourcompany.flectra.com) in the Return URL field.

Note

Any URL will do the job. Flectra only needs the setting to be enabled since it uses another URL.

Enable Payment Data Transfer (PDT)¶

Enable the Payment Data Transfer feature to receive payment confirmations immediately. This feature also displays the payment status to the customers and verifies the authenticity of the payments.

From the Website payments settings page, go to Website preferences ‣ Update ‣ Payment data transfer and select On. PayPal displays your PDT Identity Token as soon as the change is saved.

Paypal Account Optional¶

We advise you to not prompt customers to log in with a Paypal account when they get to pay. Let them pay with debit/credit cards as well, or you might lose some deals. Make sure this setting is turned on.

Payment Messages Format¶

Suppose you use accented characters (or anything else than primary Latin characters) for your customer names or addresses. In that case, you must configure the encoding format of the payment request sent by Flectra to Paypal. Otherwise, some transactions fail without notice.

To do so, go to your production account. Then, click More Options and set the two default encoding formats as UTF-8.

Your Paypal account is ready!

Tip

For Encrypted Website Payments & EWP_SETTINGS error, please check the Paypal documentation.
Configure your Paypal Sandbox account, then follow this link to configure the encoding format in a test environment.

Test environment¶

Configuration¶

Thanks to Paypal Sandbox accounts, you can test the entire payment flow in Flectra.

Log into the Paypal Developer Site using your Paypal credentials, which creates two sandbox accounts:

A business account (to use as merchants, e.g., pp.merch01-facilitator@example.com).
A default personal account (to use as shoppers, e.g., pp.merch01-buyer@example.com).

Log into Paypal Sandbox using the merchant account and follow the same configuration instructions. Enter your sandbox credentials in Flectra and ensure Paypal is set on Test Mode. We recommend doing this on a test Flectra database rather than your main database.

Run a test transaction from Flectra using the sandbox personal account.