One of the main factors in the development of e-commerce was the arrival of CMS, those content management systems that popularized the creation of websites. These CMS also allow you to easily integrate a payment method into your site. As such, we will see how to integrate PayPal with WordPress.
Our consumption patterns are evolving and turning more and more towards e-commerce, this is not new: online purchases represented a worldwide turnover of more than 3 trillion euros in 2019, that is to say 20 , 7% more than in 2018, and this strong growth should continue over the next five years.
WordPress and Shopify, two easy-to-use CMS
Thanks to CMS, it is possible to create and manage your online store to sell your products and services around the world. WordPress and Shopify are among the most used platforms in the world by e-merchants.
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Whatever type of product or service you want to sell, these two CMS offer a large number of customizable themes (free and paid) so that you can create a site that reflects your business. Indeed, it is very easy to add your logo, your colors, the photos of your products, your premises, or even to tell the story of your company and its team. All in just a few clicks.
The intuitive CMS interface allows you to quickly get to grips with the back-end (Where back office, the administration part of your site) to perform essential tasks such as adding customizable product sheets that can be organized by categories and sub-categories of your choice.
Take the example of a furniture salesperson. With a few clicks, it is possible for him to create a “lighting” section, made up of “chandeliers”, “desk lamps” or “floor lamps”, and a “furniture” section, with “living room tables” “,” Coffee tables “or” wardrobes “.
Plugins or extensions to manage your stocks
Like a physical store, you need to be able to manage your inventory and incoming orders. If this functionality is integrated as standard on Shopify, you will need to add the WooCommerce plugin to your site WordPress.
There are indeed several differences between these content managers. Although both are easy to use, Shopify is a 100% dedicated e-commerce platform and is more suitable for beginners. It also has all the functionalities of a basic merchant site including its hosting.
WordPress is a platform for creating showcase sites, blogs, but also e-commerce sites with many plug-ins allowing great customization.
Besides WooCommerce, allowing you to manage your stocks and orders, you can add features such as SEO support systems like Yoast SEO, or solutions to improve the speed of your website such as W3 Total Cache.
There are also many other plugins to manage your accounting.
Payment methods well known to customers
Finally, so that you can be paid by your customers, CMS offers you reliable payment solutions integrated into your site. Among them, we find Stripe or PayPal, which is one of the most used.
Made popular thanks to platforms like eBay, PayPal enjoys a good reputation and brings confidence to your customers, who do not have to enter their bank details, only their e-mail address.
However, there are many other payment solutions such as Hipay, Ingenico or payment in cryptocurrency and by bank card.
Your customer will only have to indicate his delivery address and voila!
How to integrate payment by PayPal on WordPress?
Now, here’s how to integrate PayPal into your WordPress site. It is one of the most used payment methods in the world and it is very easy to set up.
Adding PayPal as a payment method assumes that you have already installed the WooCommerce plugin and have a PayPal Business (free) account. Note that WooCommerce already integrates Paypal Standard, this module allows your customers who have a PayPal account to buy your products and services from your site.
To get started, go to the “extensions” tab of your WordPress dashboard.
Click “add” on the next page. Then just search for the plugin by typing its name on the search bar. When it is displayed, click on the corresponding “install” button then activate the plugin.
WooCommerce now appears on the menu to the right of your dashboard. Click on it and then click on Settings.
You will see several tabs, including “payments”.
When you click on it, you will see the payment methods installed by default on WooCommerce, including PayPal Standard.
This payment method is the only one activated in the screenshot below. In other words, customers will only have this choice when checking out. Click PayPal to configure the solution.
To receive payments on your PayPal account, you must mainly enter three pieces of information in the PayPal Standard settings of WooCommerce: your PayPal email as well as the API username and password.
To find these strings, go to your PayPal Business account and log in. Then go to “Preferences”, “Account settings”, “My sales” then click on the “Update” button corresponding to “API access”.
Now click on “request API credentials”.
Confirm on the next page by selecting “Request API signature”.
Now all you have to do is display the newly generated strings and copy and paste them on your WordPress dashboard.
Then click on the “Save modification” button on WordPress for the system to take your information into account.
You are now able to receive payments from 286 million potential buyers with a PayPal account.