How to integrate PayPal payment gateway in PHP?

Milan Panchasara
An Idea (by Ingenious Piece)
3 min readJun 9, 2022
Image by: Milan Source: Self made

With an increasing fondness for digital commerce, payment mediums are not just limited to cash and card. Today, we can pay using countless methods such as cash, debit and credit cards, online wallets, and digital payment gateways such as PayPal.

Users often feel sceptical about using online payment methods because of security reasons. However, PayPal is breaking this norm with its highly secure, quick, and easy transactions. PayPal is, in fact, one of the most trusted online payment methods globally.

PayPal’s popularity is so far-reached as businesses are increasingly integrating PayPal payment gateway in their PHP-based platforms. “But, why is PHP so popular among businesses?” Are you thinking that? If yes, here are some reasons that you should know about.

  • There are 426 million active PayPal consumer accounts
  • PayPal records approximately 40,006 payments annually
  • Stunning features like pay with QR codes, credit/debit cards, and crypto
  • Uses a fraud detection technology, device fingerprinting
  • It is a secular platform for merchants to grow their business globally

Now the bigger and more crucial question is how to integrate the PayPal payment gateway in PHP? That’s the question we are going to address next. So, keep reading.

How to integrate the PayPal payment gateway into a PHP-based website? Let’s follow the steps.

Create a sandbox account

First comes creating a business account on PayPal and then getting sandbox credentials from your PayPal developer account. PayPal sandbox is a testing environment to test, accept and send payments.

Create index.PHP file

The next step is to create an index.PHP file that will gather the product record from the shopping database and display them on the page.

Create a success.PHP file

The success file is created to identify and confirm the payment transaction. After the successful transaction, the gateway will return the following information-

  • Item number
  • Transaction ID
  • Currency code
  • Payment status

Create a cancel.PHP file

In case the transaction gets cancelled, create a cancel.PHP file to redirect the transaction and copy-paste the following code.

“<h1>Sorry! Your PayPal Payment has been cancelled.</h1>”

Testing the submission

Lastly, you can test the submission by using fake accounts and testing the PayPal integration to make sure it works flawlessly. You can go live with the PHP code if everything works well. Furthermore, you can change the sandbox mode to live.

Conclusion

By following the above steps strictly, integrating PayPal into PHP-based platforms will become quite doable. Actually, the best thing about PayPal is that it enables online payment integration on the PHP websites within a day or two.

However, if you are not a developer, PayPal integration might give you a tough time. So, to beat the odds, it is always safer to hire experienced PHP developers to do this job perfectly. Moreover, you can also hire PHP developers from our software development company and let our experts integrate PayPal into your PHP websites with utmost precision.

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Milan Panchasara
An Idea (by Ingenious Piece)

Tech Writer & Sr. Marketing Consultant | 6 Years of Exp. | Write on Popular Technology & Different Industries. | LinkedIn: https://rb.gy/00j83