PayPal Standard

GiveWP supports the PayPal Standard gateway within the free core plugin. The same is true for the GiveWP Recurring Donations Add-on. This document describes how PayPal Standard works with GiveWP and the Recurring Donations Add-on.

Get the Recurring Donations Add-on View Add-on

Recurring Donations supports PayPal Standard. Contrary to static-donations with PayPal Standard, you’ll need a little more setup to properly configure Recurring Donations with PayPal Standard.

Configuring PayPal Standard for Recurring Donations

You’ll need three things from your PayPal Standard account to properly configure GiveWP for Recurring Donations:

• Live API Username
• Live API Password
• Live API Signature

It’s possible that your account already has those three pieces of information, and you’ll need to find them. If you don’t have this information, you may need to create new credentials.

To clarify: GiveWP will still work with PayPal Standard to create donation subscriptions and charge your donors on a recurring basis, even without the API keys entered into the settings. What these credentials entered into the settings do is allow you (and donors) to do things like cancel the subscription from the GiveWP side, and manage basic subscription functionality there.

PayPal makes the settings for its legacy products hard to find because different account types have completely different user interfaces, so this next section is a bit of an adventure in creative problem-solving.

For many GiveWP users, this link will take you to the correct settings: PayPal API settings

From there, you should either create API credentials or copy and paste the ones there into the settings page at Donations > Settings > Payment Gateways > PayPal > PayPal Standard.

If the link above does not take you directly to the correct page on your account to create those credentials, you’ll need to poke around the PayPal interface in search of “Account Access,” “API Access,” and/or “NVP/SOAP (Classic) API credentials.” Classic credentials are what you need to connect GiveWP to PayPal Standard recurring.

Configure Your Donation Form

Now that you’re all set with PayPal Standard, all you need to do is configure your form to accept Recurring Donations.

The Recurring Donations Getting Started doc has all the info and links you need. If you get stuck, reach out to GiveWP support.

Troubleshooting issues with Recurring Donations On PayPal Standard

A key component of recurring donations showing up on the site from PayPal Standard is the Instant Payment Notification or IPN.

Here’s the order of how GiveWP works with PayPal Standard to process the initial donation on a subscription:

1. The donor fills out the donation form and submits the donation.
2. A donation and subscription are created on the GiveWP side and set to “pending.”
3. All of the information is sent to PayPal to process the transaction and set up the subscription.
4. The gateway processes everything and notifies your WordPress website (via the IPN) that it went through.
5. GiveWP processes that IPN and sets the donation to complete, and marks the subscription as active.
6. From that point on, GiveWP waits to hear from PayPal when a new transaction on a subscription happens. That all happens via the IPN, and each new donation on a subscription(called a renewal on the GiveWP side) is recorded in response to an IPN hitting the site.

If your site is not marking donations as complete, or new renewals are not being recorded by GiveWP even when they have happened at PayPal, the first place to look is at the IPN settings.

See this exhaustive doc on troubleshooting IPN issues.