If we’re setting up PayPal to work with your website, we may ask for your PayPal email address and password, then we’ll deal with all the technical settings ourselves.
However, due to the stricter security settings on some PayPal accounts, occasionally we need you to gather some information for us, because PayPal won’t allow us access to some parts of your account!
For example, we’ll normally setup what’s called the PayPal “API” system, which means your website is authorised to issue refunds to customers, etc. This ensures your website is properly authorised and linked with your PayPal account.
Please note, you must have a PayPal business account in order to link payments into your website.
If we’ve asked you to send us your PayPal API details, please do the following:
- Login to your PayPal account at https://www.paypal.com/signin.
- Go to the “Account Settings” screen, which you can access by clicking the cog icon at the top of the screen, indicated in orange below:
- In “Account Access“, click on “API Access“.
- Under “NVP/SOAP API integration (Classic)“, click on “Manage API credentials“.
- Next, PayPal will usually prompt you to complete a security check. If this happens, PayPal will either text you a verification code, or make an automated call to your registered phone number, asking you to complete this security step.
- On the following screen, you’ll then see the option to “Request an API signature“.
- Next, you should see “API Username“, “API password” and “Signature“, with a “Show” link for each of these.
- Please send us these details, along with confirmation of your PayPal account’s email address. We strongly recommend using our online tool to encrypt your details first, before emailing the info to us, for increased security.
This guide was last updated in February 2020 to reflect changes to PayPal’s settings screens.