PayPal Website Payments Standard

Introduction

PayPal’s website payments standard is a great solution for beginners and small businesses around the world, and we highly recommend this option if you’re just getting started with online payments or process a smaller volume of monthly transactions. You can have a PayPal account set up in minutes, and there is no need for an outside merchant account.

If you’re looking for a more serious business solution with more advanced payment features, including a completely integrated solution that does not redirect your users to PayPal.com for payment, then we recommend you take a look at our PayPal Website Payments Pro option.

For more information about the difference between Website Payment Standard and Website Payments Pro, please view PayPal’s comparison chart.

The User Experience

The user experience for the PayPal and Wufoo integration consists of three major processes.

Complete Wufoo Form

The user will complete your Wufoo form just like they would any Wufoo form. This form will validate for any errors, and when a form validates and is submitted, the user will be redirected to PayPal to pay.

Complete PayPal Payment Form

When the user is redirected to PayPal for payment, they will be presented with a listing of the items they are purchasing and a form to collect their payment information. A buyer is not required to have a PayPal account, but they will have the option to create a PayPal account on the payment page. The buyer will either choose to pay through a PayPal account or through a credit card. PayPal will validate the transaction, display any errors if there are problems, and redirect to a confirmation page after a successful payment is completed.

View Confirmation Page

The PayPal confirmation page will notify a buyer that a payment was successful and provide a link to click on. Clicking on this link will return the buyer to either a standard Wufoo confirmation page or a URL of your choosing if you customized the redirect URL option in your form.

Configuring Wufoo

To integrate PayPal with Wufoo, all that you will need is the email address that you use to log into your PayPal account. You will log into you Wufoo account, edit your form’s Payment Settings, and enter that email address into the “Email Address” field.

Integrate PayPal Payment Status with Wufoo

When a Wufoo payment form is completed, you can view the status of the submission (i.e. Paid, Unpaid, Pending, Refunded) in the Wufoo entry manager. By default, all submissions will be marked as “Unpaid”, but once payment is received through PayPal, the submission will be marked as “Paid”. No action is necessary on your end for the status to update in real time.

Customize PayPal Payment Form

Wufoo does not send PayPal any information about the look of a PayPal order form. If you would like to customize the look of the PayPal order form, you will need to log into your PayPal account and edit the settings through PayPal.

Is The Buyer Required to Have a PayPal Account?

A buyer may be required to have an account with PayPal. PayPal is in complete control of the user experience after a user is redirected to PayPal.com.

How Much is PayPal and Which Plan Should I Choose?

PayPal’s fee structure is broken down at https://www.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_display-pop-fees-outside. If you are looking to process credit cards through PayPal, we recommend using one of PayPal’s Premier or Business accounts, and signing up for the Website Payment Standard plan.

How Can I Stop a Recurring Charge?

If you have set up a transaction as a recurring charge inside of Wufoo and would like to stop that charge, you will need to log into your PayPal account in order to stop the charges. Wufoo has no control of a transaction once the initial Wufoo form is submitted and a buyer is redirected to PayPal.

Why aren’t my users properly redirected after completing their PayPal transaction?

PayPal requires your website to accept a POST when they redirect a user to your website. Sometimes this can be done by simply making your page a .php or .asp page, but it could also require some configuration of your servers. We recommend looking at PayPal’s forums or doing a Google search for the error that you’ve received.

Why are my paid entries showing up as unpaid?

To check if the status of your PayPal payments is being correctly sent to Wufoo, please log into PayPal and click “History” -> “IPN History” -> “Search Last 28 Days”. If all of the entries are showing up as “Sent” and the corresponding entries show up as “Unpaid” in Wufoo’s entry manager, please contact our support department so we can try and help you out.

If all of the entries are not showing up as “Sent”, please make sure that your PayPal IPN settings are enabled. To check this log into PayPal and click “Profile” -> “Instant Notification Preferences” ->”Choose IPN Settings”. If you haven’t been receiving updates, then make sure “Receive IPN messages (Enabled)” is checked. You’ll also want to configure the Notification URL by adding a link to “https://YOURNAME.wufoo.com/merchant/paypal/index.php”.