Home → Using FormSpring → 3rd Party Integrations → PayPal Integration
3.1. PayPal Integration
It's simple to integrate PayPal's Website Payments Standard service with FormSpring:
- Go to your form's Settings page and click on 3rd Party Integration.
- Click the Add button for Paypal and then click on the new Paypal tab that appears below the 3rd Party Integration tab.
- Enter your PayPal account email address in the PayPal Email Address field, and set any of the other PayPal Options you need.
Once users fill out your form on FormSpring, they'll be redirected to PayPal to complete the payment process.
For basic PayPal integration, you need two form fields, a price or product field and an (optional) quantity field. When setting up your price/product field, if you use a radio button, select list or checkbox field, you can click on "Use separate values" and associate a price with your product name. Otherwise, you can use a short answer or number field and let the user enter their own price.
To set up PayPal Integration, first click on 3rd Party Integration and then click on the Add button for Paypal.
Now you will see a new tab below 3rd Party Integration called Paypal. Click on this and type in your PayPal e-mail address and then choose your price and quantity fields from the drop-down lists.
If you have multiple items, you set those up the same way by clicking on the Multiple Items option in PayPal Integration. However, you may instead choose to calculate a total on the form itself using a self-calculating form field and pass that number on to PayPal as the Price field, leaving the Quantity field blank. Either method for multiple items will work.
Note: You can only have one redirect or message action that will execute per form submission, so once you've redirected the user to another URL, any subsequent redirects won't work, and no messages will be displayed to the user. Similarly, if you have a custom message displayed to the user, the user can't be redirected afterward. However, you can run any behind-the-scenes actions, such as sending payments to Authorize.Net or adding contacts to Highrise.
PayPal Subscriptions
Under Payment Integration, you also have the option of setting up recurring subscriptions. You choose the fields for Recurring Amount, which is the amount the user will be billed, and Billing Cycle, which is how often they will be billed (once a week, once a month, once a year, etc.). You can also set how many times you want them to be rebilled (infinite is selected by default).
PayPal Donations
If you use your form to take donations, you can choose the Donations option in Payment Integration to get rid of the Price and Quantity fields and replace them with a field for donation Amount.
Test Mode
There are two modes for Paypal integration, Production and Test. Production is the mode that lets you accept real payments. Test mode lets you test your form in the sandbox to see if it's working. You will need a Paypal sandbox account in order to use test mode.
PayPal Options
The table below describes the fields that you can set to integrate your form with PayPal.
You can refer to https://www.paypal.com/IntegrationCenter/ic_std-variable-reference.html for a more technical explanation of PayPal variables.
| Field | Description | PayPal Variable |
| Business | Email address for your PayPal account. | business |
| Item Name | Description of item. | item_name |
| Amount | The price or amount of the purchase, not including shipping, handling, or tax. If omitted, customers can enter an amount at time of purchase. | amount |
| Quantity | Number of items. The amount, shipping and tax are multiplied by the quantity to derive the total payment amount. | quantity |
| Let buyer specify | Allows buyer to specify the quantity. | undefined_quantity |
| Currency | The currency of the payment. Defines the currency in which the monetary variables (amount, shipping, shipping2, handling, tax) are denoted. | currency_code |
| Handling Charge | Handling charges. This is not quantity-specific. The same handling cost is charged regardless of the number of items purchased. | handling |
| Shipping Charge | The cost of shipping this item if you have enabled item-specific shipping costs. If this is used and Shipping Addtl is not defined, this flat amount is charged regardless of the quantity of items purchased. | shipping |
| Shipping Addtl | The cost of shipping each additional item. If omitted, and Profile-based shipping is enabled, your customer is charged the amount or percentage defined in your Profile. | shipping2 |
| Tax | Transaction-based tax override variable. Set this to a flat tax amount to apply to the transaction regardless of the buyer's location. This value overrides any tax settings set in your Profile. | tax |
| Invoice # | Variable you can use to identify your invoice number for this purchase. | invoice |
| Page Style | Sets the Custom Payment Page Style for payment pages. | page_style |
| Return URL | The URL to which the customer's browser is returned after completing the payment; for example, a URL on your site that displays a "Thank you for your payment" page. If not specified, the customer is taken to the PayPal website | return |
| Continue Text | Sets the text for the Continue button on the PayPal Payment Complete page. Note: The return URL must also be set. | cbt |
| Cancel URL | A URL to which the customer's browser is returned if payment is canceled; for example, a URL on your website that displays a "Payment Canceled" page. If not specified, the customer is directed to the PayPal website. | cancel_return |
| No Shipping | If checked the customer will not be prompted to provide a shipping address. | no_shipping |
| No Note | If checked the customer will not be prompted to include a note with payment. | no_note |
| First Name Last Name Address1 Address2 City State Zip Country |
If selected, the values submitted in your form will pre-populate these fields on the PayPal site. | first_name last_name address1 address2 city state zip country |