PayPal Integration
PayPal remains where whole customer segments live — and it integrates differently from every other gateway. Wired properly it lifts checkout conversion; wired lazily it adds a second payment system that disagrees with your orders.
PayPal integration is less about the button and more about the bookkeeping around it. PayPal has its own checkout session, its own currency conversion, its own dispute center, and its own ideas about order states. Done properly, orders flow with amounts, currencies and statuses intact; done lazily, you learn about a sale from an email instead of your database.
The common build: express checkout layered onto an existing store (WooCommerce, Shopify, or custom), with webhooks confirming capture the same way Stripe does, currency and shipping address handling decided deliberately rather than defaulted, and the dispute/refund path documented. Where PayPal is the secondary gateway beside Stripe, the reconciliation rules get written down — which system is the record of truth for which outcomes.
Honest boundary: PayPal's seller protections and hold policies are PayPal's — the integration cannot and should not pretend otherwise, and the build accounts for their settlement timing rather than promising it away. Scope follows the brief; fixed quote.
What the engagement covers
- Express or standard checkout wired to your store's cart and order flow
- Webhook handling for capture, denial, refund and dispute events — verified, not assumed
- Currency, tax and shipping-address passthrough decided deliberately per market
- WooCommerce / Shopify / custom platform wiring with the order-state map documented
- Refund and dispute workflows written down: who does what, where, when
- Test transactions end to end — sandbox coverage, then one small live charge
Honest limits
What this is deliberately not.
Not this: Predicting or preventing PayPal account holds — their risk engine decides that; the integration accounts for it honestly
Not this: A second dashboard nobody reconciles — if PayPal sales never reach your books, the real problem is process, said plainly
Not this: Cross-border tax advice — your accountant's jurisdiction, not this build
Not this: Guarantees on PayPal's own uptime or policy changes — their platform, their rules
Questions · PayPal
Asked before building.
Often yes, as a conversion matter rather than a payments matter: a real customer segment treats PayPal as the default and aborts checkouts that lack it. The honest test is your audience — international and digital-goods buyers skew PayPal-heavy. The integration cost is modest when the order flow already exists from Stripe work.
Usually currency, account configuration, or an unverified business account — the money waits on PayPal's side while the checkout believes it succeeded. The fix is account-level, not code: the integration review names the exact setting, and the order-state handling reflects the real settlement timing instead of wishful instant-success logic.
Yes, routinely — express PayPal beside card fields is a standard pattern. The engineering that matters is state handling: one order record, two possible payment rails, no double-charging when a customer abandons one method mid-flow and retries the other. That is scoped and tested, not assumed.
Scoped from the brief like every engagement here — an express-checkout layer on an existing store is a different animal from PayPal as the primary rail for a custom-built system. Fixed quote, in writing, after one conversation; the rates page carries the hourly context.
Related: all integrations · the integrations stack page · the requirements template.
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