The Gravity forms plugin has a PayPal add-on to allow order forms to be integrated with your PayPal account and to accept online payments.
When the order form has gets submitted, the customer is sent to the PayPal website to complete their payment.
Once payment has been made by the customer, PayPal IPN sends real time feedback from your PayPal account that verifies your customer’s order payment has been received.
Getting Ready to Use Gravity forms with the PayPal Add-on
To use the Gravity forms with the PayPal add-on, you need the Gravity Forms plugin and the Gravity Forms PayPal Add-On Plugin activated in your website; and you need a PayPal business account.
Please read Configuring Gravity Forms to learn more about activating these plugins, and creating Gravity forms.
Preparing your PayPal Account
Gravity forms requires the IPN (Instant Payment Notification) feature to be enabled on your PayPal account. To do this:
Click on Profile, then navigate to your PayPal IPN Settings page.
If IPN is already enabled, you will see your current IPN settings along with a button to turn off IPN.
If IPN is not enabled, click the ‘Choose IPN Settings’ button.
Check the box to enable IPN (if not already enabled).
Log out of your PayPal account.
Once you have setup IPN in your PayPal account you must then confirm that you have done so by ticking the confirmation box on the Gravity Forms PayPal Settings page within the Forms menu on your Dashboard.
Preparing a Gravity form with a PayPal Buy Now button
Plan the information you wish to capture from your customers using your Gravity order form.
Create an order confirmation page, the order form and set up Notifications using Configuring Gravity Forms.
Having taken these steps to create your order form, you will be ready to add PayPal functionality to your order form.
Do this by selecting and clicking on the appropriate field types shown on the right hand side under the heading Price Fields.
Gravity Forms Pricing Fields
Click on the Edit button to edit the fields to change the Field Label, tick the box if they are Required (mandatory), and apply other advanced settings. Drag and drop the fields to change their order of appearance.
Field Types:
Product: Specify the price; add an optional quantity field; and nominate whether this is a single product, has a user defined price or offer dropdown or multiple choice and allow the visitor choose one option from a set of options. This last option displays as a drop down list or as radio buttons for multiple choice.
Option: offers multiple options with unique prices in a drop down, checkbox or multiple choice format.
Donation: take a donation with options for a user defined price or nominate a range of options in a drop down or multiple choice format.
Quantity: offers a quantity field where the quantity is displayed as a number, in a dropdown list or can be hidden. Option to specify a minimum and maximum quantity range.
Shipping: Add the cost of shipping using a single value, a dropdown or multiple choice list.
Total: summarises the total value of the order, including optional shipping.
Activate the PayPal Feed
Take this step for each order form that incorporates PayPal.
In the Forms menu, click on the PayPal sub-option.
Click on the Add New button to add a new PayPal feed.
Enter your PayPal email address.
Select the Production mode, from the choice of Production and Test.
Select a transaction Type – Product & Services for standard transactions or Donations & Subscriptions for recurring payments.
Select the Gravity form with which you would like to integrate.
If you have selected a recurring Transaction Type you will be given options for the recurring amount, billing cycle, recurring times and trial period. This information is used to establish the recurring payment.
Map the PayPal fields to your available Form fields. This tells Gravity Forms which form fields should pre-populate the available PayPal fields. This is optional, but hightly recommended.
Enter a custom page Style name if you are using custom PayPal Page Styles. This is optional, and typically for advanced users only.
Enter a custom Cancel URL that will be used if the customer cancels the transaction before completing it. This is optional.
Select available PayPal options. Options allow you to determine when notificiation are sent and if post and/or user are created before or after payment is received.
Save the Feed.
PayPal Subscription Cancellations
Please remember that a user wishing to cancel a subscription must do so from their PayPal account or you will have to manually cancel their recurring subscription from within your PayPal account.
There is no cancellation functionality built into the PayPal Add-On. When a PayPal Subscription is canceled within PayPal it will communicate back to your site via PayPal IPN and update the entry data with the canceled subscription status.
Other Useful & Associated Skills
You may wish to add an image or text to your Sidebar or your Home page that links to your Gravity/PayPal order form. For example, a clickable Button or clickable text inviting customers view your special offers encourages curiosity.
Consider where you will place your order form. You may wish to add it to an existing page, add it to a new page or add it to your sidebar.
These How To articles describe further useful skills:
Configuring Gravity Forms
Other useful features
You can nominate a limited quantity of a particular product or service for sale. Once that product/service quota is reached, no further sales are allowed. You can accept donations or payments of an unspecified or user defined amount.
Advanced Note
If you login to your PayPal account and find that your IPN is already active and you that you have another Notification URL populated here, you do not need to populate the Gravity Form IPN Notification URL.
Gravity Form/PayPal only requires that the IPN is enabled and that any Notification URL is populated in your PayPal settings. The Gravity Form IPN Notification URL is sent as the ‘return_url’ parameter for every PayPal Add-on transaction.
See also: How To Configure Gravity Forms
