PayPal
Begin by activating the payment gateway under Setup > Payment Gateways
Contents
Instant Payment Notification (IPN)
For PayPal invoices to be automatically marked paid when you receive a payment you need to enable IPN inside your PayPal account. This is done in the My Account > Profile > My Selling Preferences > Instant payment notifications. It's not important what URL you use so set it to your system url eg. http://www.yourdomain.com/whmcspath/ Then select the "Enabled" option.
PayPal Subscriptions/Recurring Billing
Unless disabled in the PayPal gateway config, when a user views an invoice for a recurring product or service they will be shown a PayPal Subscribe button. This allows the user to subscribe so that their payment for that product or service is sent to you automatically each month/quarter/etc... and automatically applied to the appropriate renewal invoices by WHMCS.
There are two conditions that must be met for the PayPal subscribe button to appear:
- The invoice's Due Date must be in the future
- The invoice must contain at least 1 recurring product (ie. domains and billable items on their own won't create subscriptions)
If an invoice contains both a product, and addons or domains, then any which match the products billing cycle will also be included as part of the subscription. For example, if an invoice contained a product, an addon & a domain, all of which recur on an annual basis, then the PayPal subscription that gets created by WHMCS would be for the total amount of all 3 items so that the subscription would cover everything and pay the renewal invoice in full automatically. What isn't possible however is to create a subscription that has different amounts recurring on different recurring terms, ie. $x Monthly + $Y Annually. PayPal doesn't offer an option for that at the current time.
Customising Invoice Emails for Subscriptions
When a subscription is created, the Subscription ID number that gets issued by PayPal is stored by WHMCS in the Subscription ID field for the product. Similarly when a subscription is cancelled the Subscription ID gets removed again. Therefore it is possible to use that ID value to determine if a subscription exists and therefore customise the text shown to the customer in the invoice related emails based on that.
For example, one might customise the "Invoice Created" email template to show different instructions to the customer if a subscription exists (meaning no manual action is required), compared with if one doesn't (meaning the client needs to login and pay the invoice manually), for example:
{if $invoice_subscription_id}
As you have a PayPal Subscription setup, payment will be taken automatically within the
next few days. Please ensure you have enough funds in your PayPal account to cover it.
{else}
You can login to your client area to view and pay the invoice at {$invoice_link}
{/if}
Automated Refunds
As of version 4, you can issue refunds for PayPal payments directly from within WHMCS. Before you can do this however, you need to setup PayPal API access. The steps for doing this are as follows:
- Login to PayPal
- Go to Profile > API Access
- Choose Option 2 - Request API credentials to create your own API username and password.
- Choose Option 1 - Request API Signature and click Agree and Submit
- Copy the username, password and signature that get provided and then click Done
- Enter the details from the previous step into the WHMCS Payment Gateways config screen where requested
You will now be able to enter a refund and have it sent from PayPal at the same time from within the WHMCS admin area invoice management screen.
Error Messages
Invalid Receiver Email
WHMCS validates the payment receiver email value against the details specified under Setup > Payments > Payment Gateways so this error means the two do not match. If multiple PayPal accounts are used to receive payment they must all be listed in a comma separated list eg. email1@mycompany.com,email2@mycompany.com. The first email you specify will then be the email used for new payments, but any email in the field will be accepted as an invoice payment.
Not Supported
This Result will appear when an action occurs that does not require any action on WHMCS' behalf, for example a txn_type value of "subscr_failed" mean a subscription payment failed or "subscr_eot" means End of Subscription Term. You will see these entries under normal operation and is not a problem.
Unrecognised Currency
This error in the Gateway Log means an invalid currency code has been entered under Setup > Payments > Currencies. A currency code must use the ISO 4217 standard as explained on the Currencies page. For example EURO is not valid, but EUR is valid.
This could also be caused by a blank space at the beginning or end of the currency code, so edit the code to ensure there are none.
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