The Design-Editor Store supports PayPal Standard, PayPal Express Checkout, PayPal Advanced, PayPal Payflow Link, and PayPal Payments Pro 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.

It is the easiest in use and setup solution from PayPal. In addition to regular payments within PayPal accounts, this methods also allows users to pay by credit card without having them to create a PayPal account.

In order to connect your PayPal merchant account to your store you need to take the following steps:

Note: * The auto-return will force your customers to return to your store (and to which URL they will be returned) after they have completed the payment at PayPal. Basically this setting isn't necessary: PayPal will show a button like 'return to the store' that will lead the customers back to the shop.

However, you may want to enable it in the following cases:

a) If you want to track sales using Google Adwords or any other tool and you have a tracking code inserted in control panel, Settings → General → Cart. In this case, the code is triggered when customers get to Thank you for your order page therefore you need to force the auto return.

b) If you're going to use one PayPal account in several separate Design-Editor stores. The Design-Editor Store will pass the correct URL along with each payment request, so customers will be returned to the site where they started the checkout (i.e. your shop).

The main thing is to enable IPN (Instant Order Notifications) setting. IPN is a message transmitted from PayPal to your store via a special secure channel and indicating the status of the payment. So this setting will ensure that your Design-Editor store will be notified about whether the customer did complete the payment or the transaction has been failed. Upon receiving such a notification, The Design-Editor Store is able to update the order status accordingly. Thus having IPN properly setup in your PayPal account is crucial for the automatic accepting of orders in The Design-Editor Store.

** This step is necessary to avoid issues with shipping calculation in the store: If you have any shipping rates configured in the PayPal account, they may override the rates from your store. As a result the order may arrive at status Awaiting Payment.

PayPal Express Checkout

It's a more advanced solution by PayPal. It provides an alternative checkout process for your store.

Have you generated an API certificate or signature before?

1. If no, you need to generate a signature. Use instructions provided by PayPal:​ Obtaining API Credentials.

2. If yes, then there are two options:

PayPal Payflow Link and PayPal Payments Advanced

PayPal Payflow Link and PayPal Advanced payment methods are available to merchants from the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and UK.

PayPal Advanced method is for US merchants only.

PayPal Payflow is a "true" payment gateway that links your website to your merchant account (a type of bank account that allows businesses to accept payments by credit card and get payments directly to your bank) and payment processor (a company that handles credit card transactions for a merchant acquiring bank). More information about PayPal Payflow can be found here: https://www.paypal.com/webapps/mpp/payflow-payment-gateway

If you don't have a merchant account, you can use PayPal Payments Advanced:

This payment method enables online stores to collect payments directly via credit card without leaving site as well. From an integration standpoint, PayPal Payments Advanced is identical to the PayPal Payflow gateway (so you can use it with our Payflow integration), with the following exceptions:

Please, also refer to this page for more info: ​https://www.paypal.com/webapps/mpp/paypal-payments-advanced

So, to sum it up: if you don't want to create a merchant account, go with PayPal Advanced to accept credit cards without leaving a website.

PayPal Payments Pro Hosted

PayPal Payments Pro Hosted offers a way to securely accept credit and debit cards or PayPal payments without your customers having to leave your store: all payment options are displayed on the last checkout step in an inline frame.

PayPal Payments Pro Hosted works for UK and France only.

FAQ and Troubleshooting

All PayPal services allow paying by credit card without a PayPal account. If your customers are prompted to sign up at PayPal to pay, there may be various reasons for that, starting from cookies setup and ending up with your PayPal account settings. Please refer to this post for the detailed instructions:

www.paypal-community.com/t5/How-to-use-PayPal/buy-now-button-requires-paypal-login-or-account/m-p/15587

Yes, if you have a Personal account, it will work with store just fine. Use PayPal Standard payment option.

If you see any order in PayPal and don't see it in The Design-Editor Store, first of all make sure that your PayPal module is set up properly and all the steps from this instruction above have been carried out. Pay particular attention to IPN messages - they must be enabled.

If all PayPal settings are correct, open "IPN History" page in your PayPal backend and check it for any errors or failed IPN messages. If you have any failed messages related to the missing orders there, try to re-send them:

If the above doesn't help, please report the issue to our support team, and we will investigate it closely.

If an order is successfully placed and you have fully charged the customer for it, it should get "Paid" status. Status "Awaiting Payment" means that the order is pending or it has been placed but the money has not been transferred to your account yet. You can check what error is returned from PayPal in the order details in the control panel, section 'Additional information.

There may be several reasons why some PayPal order gets Awaiting Payment status instead of Paid. We enumerate them below.

Here is a list of possible pending reasons:

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 Paid automatically.

In this case, usually the orders are processed successfully and the money is paid. You will see this error message in the order details, on 'Sales' page at The Design-Editor Store control panel. There are three possible causes

The order total, formed in The Design-Editor Store, doesn't match the order total returned by PayPal. Probably, you are using PayPal's taxes or shipping rates (enabled in your PayPal merchant account). These rates are appended to the order total when customer is redirected to PayPal. You need to check your PayPal manager account for tax and shipping settings, and disable them if any.

The currency in which The Design-Editor Store store sells differs from the one set in your PayPal account. You need to make sure you setup the same currency on both sides.

The payments are transferred to the PayPal email that differs from that you specified in the The Design-Editor Store control panel, Settings → Payment → 'Account details' of the PayPal Standard payment method.

As a security measure, to avoid any possible hack attempts, The Design-Editor Store requires that the payment is processed to the PayPal email that is recorded in the The Design-Editor Store control panel. If the transaction has a different email, The Design-Editor Store sets the order status to Awaiting Payment or PayPal will mark the order as pending.

Most likely you have two emails associated with your business PayPal account, both are valid therefore PayPal accepted the payment. Yet only one of the emails is supposed to receive the payments.

You need to make sure you submitted the right PayPal email in your The Design-Editor Store control panel, Settings>Payment> 'Account details'. If you're not sure to what email you're receiving payments, you can contact PayPal customer support or our support team on the forums - they will examine your orders records.

When a payment is made, PayPal sends an IPN (instant payment notification) message to The Design-Editor Store with the payment details. The Design-Editor Store verifies this IPN message and if everything is 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 Awaiting Payment.

You received an email notification from The Design-Editor Store about a new order, check your PayPal account and don't find anything there. Then you go back to The Design-Editor Store, see "Sales" page, go to the order details and discover that the order is in status Awaiting Payment, and "Additional Information" section shows this:

This order is in the "Awaiting Payment" status, because the money has not been transferred to your PayPal account yet

Pending reason returned by PayPal:

The payment is pending because it was made to an email address that is not yet registered or confirmed.

The Design-Editor Store "communicates" with online payment gateways via merchant's payment account, using the account details recorded in the The Design-Editor Store control panel. If you submit PayPal account email as example@example.org, The Design-Editor Store will transmit this email to PayPal thus telling PayPal, "This payment must be transferred to this account registered in your system". PayPal checks whether this email exists, and if not (or there's a problem with the account) the payment isn't completed, the money hangs in Pending status on PayPal side, and the order gets Awaiting Payment status in The Design-Editor Store.

The first thing you need to do is to make sure you have the right email address in 'Account details' of the PayPal Standard method in The Design-Editor Store control panel, Settings → Payment page.

If it's the right one, most likely when this order was placed, your PayPal account wasn't yet confirmed/verified. As a result the money was taken from the payer account but hang in pending status. A solution here is to wait while the account is verified - the money will be delivered there.

If the email is submitted with an error (mistype) or you put a wrong email there, possible steps to rectify the issue are as follows:

If the order is test one, that's OK. Just update your PayPal settings in The Design-Editor Store control panel, and make one more test order to ensure it's all working (orders should arrive at Paid status)

If the order is real and you're going to ship the items, the money will remain pending at PayPal side for the next ±45 days. If you nobody claim for the funds, they will be returned to the payer. What you can do in this case:

When the money is transferred to you, you can change the orders statuses to Paid in The Design-Editor Store control panel, Sales page.

The Design-Editor Store 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, The Design-Editor Store will prevent this and set the order status to "Awaiting Payment" instead of "Paid".

Thus the main point is as follows: if your PayPal order gets the "Awaiting Payment" status instead of "Paid", you should carefully check this order in the PayPal backend for possible issues.

If you have a "Awaiting Payment" PayPal order, but still don't know why it has got this status, please report to our support team on the forums and provide the following information: 1) your Store ID 2) the ID of the Awaiting Payment order.

The main difference between PayPal Standard and Express Checkout is that Standard is a payment method, whereas Express Checkout is an alternative checkout process.

PayPal Express Checkout works as follows:

PayPal Standard works as follows:

Usually, such a message appears when some PayPal Express Checkout credentials are missing or incorrect.

​1. Check if all PayPal fields are filled in.

2. 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.

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.

the moment they proceed to PayPal when placing orders in your store, most probably you have PayPal payment method misconfigured in your The Design-Editor Store control panel → 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 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 The Design-Editor Store control panel.

If you're getting 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.

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 "Allow customers to change their shipping address on PayPal site" option on the "Payment → PayPal settings" page. If you enable this option, 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 customer can enter one shipping address in your The Design-Editor Store store and another one on PayPal side.

In order to fix this problem you should disable "Block Non-encrypted Website Payment" option in your PayPal backend.

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 The Design-Editor Store a visitor cannot modify the "button code", this option isn't necessary and should be disabled.

It's possible to link multiple The Design-Editor stores to one Paypal account. The Design-Editor Store takes care about proper values of return URLs and IPN URLs for each storefront. All you need to do is to 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, The Design-Editor Store 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.design-editor.com/paypalstandard/STOREID where STOREID is your store ID

PayPal Mobile checkout doesn't support several parameters, passed from The Design-Editor Store to PayPal, like taxes and discounts. If your order in The Design-Editor Store included a tax or discount line in the totals, PayPal won't open a mobile payment form for you, because PayPal Mobile Checkout doesn't support tax and discount parameters. You will see a regular PayPal payment form that regularly opens on desktops.