PayPal Express Checkout

Once your organization establishes a PayPal Business or Premiere account, you can integrate PayPal Express into iMIS to offer a preferred payment option to your site visitors. Setting this up involves creating your sandbox account with PayPal, creating the PayPal service in iMIS, and testing transactions between iMIS and PayPal.

Refer to the documentation on the PayPal Developer site (developer.paypal.com) for more information.

Note: The specified default currency symbol will not be displayed on your iMIS site. If the customer’s merchant account is set to a different currency than the default currency set on the iMIS site, then the total that appears on the customer’s PayPal site will correspond with the currency that they have set in their merchant account. See Quick setup for more information.

Enabling the service with PayPal

1. Sign up for Express Checkout.
2. Log in, or select Sign Up.

Note: Express Checkout requires a Business or Premier account.

3. Set up a PayPal Sandbox account to use for testing, with at least two test accounts:
   • A merchant account to represent your organization.
   • A personal account to represent your buyer.
4. Sign into your sandbox account, click API Credentials to collect the information you need to enter into iMIS to begin your setup and testing:

Setting up PayPal authorization in iMIS

Keep in mind that you will be moving between test (sandbox) mode and live mode, which requires a different Host URL and set of PayPal API Credentials. Before you begin your iMIS testing, remember that you must be signed in on the PayPal sandbox site.

Note: Keep a separate instance of iMIS configured to use your sandbox settings, for ongoing testing.

Do the following to set up PayPal authorization in iMIS:

1. Go to Settings > Finance > Pay Central.
2. Click the Gateways tab.
3. Select PAYPALEC. If the PayPal account does not exist, create it:
   1. Select Add new gateway account.
   2. From the  Gateway drop-down, select PayPal.
   3. Enter an Account code of PAYPALEC.
   4. Enter an Account Name. This is the description for the gateway.
   5. Enter your organization's values for Username , Vendor(the API Signature for your PayPal account), and Password.
   6. From the Host URL drop-down, select Live or Sandbox. Make sure to select Sandbox while testing your gateway to verify setup. This ensures a real financial transaction is not mistakenly processed during the testing.
   7. Click Save and Close.
4. Go to Settings > Finance > Payment methods, and add a payment method with the following features:
   • Code: PAYPAL
   • Name: PayPal (case-sensitive)
   • Type: Service
   • Gateway account: PAYPALEC
5. Add the PayPal payment method to a payment method set. See Payment method sets for more information.

Note: Your payment method set Display Name for PayPal must exactly match the title: PayPal. If there are any variations, PayPal will not be displayed in the cart.

6. If you are designing your own checkout pages, be sure that the Payment Creator and Submit Order Button content items are on same page.

Testing the PayPal service

Note: Open your PayPal sandbox test site.

Do the following to test your PayPal setup:

1. Go to developer.paypal.com and log in to your Business or Premier account.
2. On your iMIS site, complete a PayPal transaction:
   1. Put an item in your cart. When configured correctly, the Check Out with PayPal panel appears directly above the payment methods drop-down in the cart and on the Give & Go page.
   2. Click Check Out with PayPal, which redirects to the PayPal site.
   3. Log in to PayPal with your personal test account (not your Business or Premier account).
   4. Verify that your order details appear on the PayPal site, and click Pay Now to complete the transaction. PayPal redirects you to the confirmation page in iMIS.

The Payment Creator content item supports the PayPal Express Checkout panel when it appears outside of the context of the shopping cart, on a standalone donation page. The PayPal integration preserves any entries in the Display Name Editor (List As) and Tribute Gift Editor content items. The PayPal option can enhance your campaign success by giving visitors to your site the reassurance of a known and secure payment method.

Note: On contact account pages, the Giving History content item lists donations paid using PayPal as having a Type of Cash.

To reconcile transactions in your iMIS database with the PayPal Express entries, use the transactions report to obtain the Transaction IDs, Gross and Net amounts, dates, and PayerIDs. On the PayPal site, you can look up a PayerID to identify the purchaser.

To reconcile transactions in your iMIS database with the reports in PayPal, look at the Transaction ID that appears in the Details for an entry on the Overview page.

Note: Keep in mind that it is possible for addresses and even names to differ between iMIS and PayPal for a single Transaction ID. The Transaction ID in the merchant account listing is what pairs the two.