We have great news for PayPal-users. We are introducing a PayPal add-on for our Pronamic Pay plugin. It comes with a direct connection with PayPal. With this PayPal-payments do not longer have to be processed by a payment provider.
Payment providers
The most payment providers also support the PayPal payment method. When a PayPal payment is started at a payment provider then communicate this with PayPal. The visitor will be send to the PayPal environment of finish the payment. PayPal then informs the payment provider about the status of the payment. The payment provider at their turn informs the WordPress website about the status. In that case, the payment provider mainly acts as a conduit. That can be an advantage to have all transactions (iDEAL, creditcard, PayPal, etc.) in one overview in the dashboard of the payment provider. A disadvantage is that most payment providers also charge a (extra) fee for every successful PayPal payment.
Conditions
A advantage with a direct connection with PayPay is that you are not dependent on a second payment provider. Maybe you can not meet the therms of conditions of a Dutch payment provider, you maybe can with PayPal. Most Dutch payment providers require a Chamber of Commerce number and a business bank account. Besides that they have a list of products and services for which they won’t accept payments from. There is a big chance PayPal is more flexibel with this because of their purchase protection policy. On the forbidden activities page from PayPal you can read more about what is not allowed.
WordPress plugins
Almost all WordPress plugins we support also have a direct connection with PayPal. Most WordPress admins use the PayPal connection which comes with the WordPress plugin. On pronamic.eu we also used the PayPal connection from Easy Digital Downloads. It works fine, but also had some disadvantages. One of them was that we did nog have the PayPal payments in our WordPress dashboard on the Pronamic Pay payments page. Also we couldn’t track PayPal payments with our e-commerce tracking for Google Analytics. So we decided to develop our own Pronamic Pay PayPal add-on.
WordPress admin dashboard
When you use the Pronamic Pay PayPal add-on that gives the advantage that all payments are registered in the WordPress Dashboard under “Pay » Payments”. For example we use Mollie to handle our iDEAL payments and for PayPal payments we use the direct connection with PayPal. Thanks to our add-on all transactions of the different payment providers are now bundled on one page. The PayPal transaction number is provided with a direct link to the transaction details page of PayPal. This is very useful if you want to check the transaction details at PayPal. Also PayPal payments are now registered in e-commerce reports.
IPN and the REST API
As PayPal user you are familiar with the therm IPN. This is an abbreviation of Instant Payment Notification. IPN is a technique from PayPal that ensures that your WordPress website immediately receives a signal as soon as, for example, the PayPal payment has been made successfully. A lot of WordPress plugins use a pretty old technique to handle these signals. With Pronamic Pay we use the WordPress REST API. When you activate the PayPal add-on the REST API of your WordPress website will be extented with a /wp-json/pronamic-pay/paypal/v1 endpoint. For each PayPal-payment we start we send the /wp-json/pronamic-pay/paypal/v1/ipn-listener notification-URL. PayPal will send messages to this URL for every event related tot the PayPal-payment. These messages will be saved at the payments created in the Pronamic Pay plugin. In case of a status change message, the status of the payment will be automatically updated.
Google Analytics e-commerce tracking
A unique functionality of the Pronamic Pay plugin is that it contains a solution for Google Analytics e-commmerce tracking. When a payment is successful, the Pronamic Pay plugin can send a message to Google Analytics the transaction us successfully completed. With the PayPal add-on also PayPal payments will now be tracked.
Update or purchase
With a valid license for Pronamic Pay you can download the PayPal add-on from your account-page. If you don’t have a license yet. You can purchase a Basic license.