Set up PayPal for collecting subscription payments

Deprecation notice: This article describes the feature that is now deprecated. Please see current one.

In this article:

Collecting payments for subscription products

1. Configure your PayPal account

2. Setting up the correct payment preferences

3. Connect PayPal and Sellfy

4. Set up IPN notifications

Collecting payments for subscriptions products

Important! You must complete all 4 steps to enable recurring payment collection for your subscription products.

Receiving payments for subscription products requires a different setup than receiving regular one-time payments. There are four total steps needed to properly configure your PayPal account for recurring payments. 

If you have a Business account with PayPal, and you want to start selling subscription products, you'll use the following steps. 

  1. Upgrade to a PayPal Business account
  2. Get your Client ID and Secret key
  3. Connect the configured PayPal account with your Sellfy account
  4. Set up IPN notifications

Note: We do our best to keep this information up-to-date, but PayPal does make changes. For questions, you can always check PayPal's Help articles or contact PayPal support!

1. Configure your PayPal account

To set up your PayPal account for recurring payments, follow these steps:

  1. Visit PayPal developer portal
  2. Click Log in to Dashboard in the top right corner
  3. Enter your PayPal details to log in
  4. In the sidebar menu, click My Apps & Credentials
  5. Switch to Live > click Create App
  6. Enter an App name
  7. Click Create App

After you successfully create the app, you will be provided with a Client ID and Secret on the next page (see below). 

You need to enter both these unique details in your Sellfy account > Payment settings. Head to this section for further instructions.

2. Setting up the correct payment preferences

To ensure that payments are processed smoothly, please make sure to set your PayPal business account to accept payments automatically.

To set your Payment Receiving Preferences, you can follow these steps:
  1. Log in to your PayPal account
  2. Navigate to Settings > Seller Tools  
  3. Navigate to Payment receiving preferences > Update
  4. Select the options you prefer (the settings will save automatically)

3. Connect PayPal and Sellfy

Note: It's absolutely essential to copy-paste the Client ID and Secret correctly from your PayPal developer portal to your Sellfy account. Make sure you check if you've included all the symbols and deleted any extra spaces before and after you've copy-pasted the content.

Follow the steps below to align your PayPal and Sellfy for recurring payments.

  1. Log into your Sellfy account
  2. Navigate to Store Settings > Payment settings
  3. Scroll down to Settings for subscription products section
  4. Copy your Client ID and Secret Key from the PayPal developers portal
  5. Paste your Client ID and Secret Key into Sellfy
  6. Click Save

4. Set up IPN notifications

Important! Setting up IPN notifications on Paypal is essential to enable recurring payments to be received in your account. We recommend referring to PayPal's developer portal here for up-to-date instructions.

  1. Log into your PayPal business account
  2. Navigate to Account settings
  3. Go to Website payments > Instant payment notifications 
  4. Click Update 
  5. Click Choose IPN Setting to specify and activate listener's URL
  6. In the Notification URL bar, specify this URL: https://sellfy.com/billing/subscriptions/webhooks/paypal/ for your listener
  7. Click Receive messages (Enabled)
  8. Click Save
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