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Collect payments with PayPal

PAYPAL sends the payer to PayPal’s approval page, then captures the approved order. Nothing is credited until the capture succeeds. PayPal is the fallback gateway for any country without its own catalog entry, so it is available almost everywhere: Kenya, Rwanda, Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire, South Africa, Egypt, Tanzania, Zambia, Malawi, Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, DR Congo, Republic of the Congo, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Zimbabwe, Nigeria, and Pakistan among them.

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Before you start

  1. Create an app in the PayPal Developer dashboard under a business account owned by the ISP, and collect its client ID and client secret.
  2. Decide the settlement currency — see the warning below, because it changes more than PayPal.
  3. Plan the walled garden: the payer’s browser must reach PayPal, so a Hotspot subscriber who is not yet online cannot pay unless PayPal is reachable pre-authentication.

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Configure the gateway

1

Open Settings → Payments → PayPal

Select PayPal from the payment marketplace.
2

Enter the client ID and client secret

Both are required. The secret is stored as a secret and is not echoed back into the form after saving.
3

Choose the settlement currency

Settlement currency (required) is searchable by name or code.
4

Run a controlled test payment

Pay a small amount from the captive portal on an unauthenticated device. Confirm the approval page loads, the payment is captured, and the amount in the ledger matches what PayPal captured.
The settlement currency becomes your dashboard’s billing currency and symbol, not just PayPal’s. Changing it changes how amounts are displayed and billed across the workspace. Decide it once, deliberately, before you take live payments.

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Credentials

All three gate the switch.

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Callback URLs

None to register. PayPal returns the payer to a return URL generated per order, and a cancel URL for an abandoned checkout. PayPal webhooks are accepted and de-duplicated, but the capture is what credits a payment.

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What the payer must provide

A PayPal account or a card, on PayPal’s own page. The amount is fixed before the payer arrives, and must be greater than zero.

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How a payment completes

1

Create order

Centipid Billing authenticates against PayPal and creates an order in the settlement currency, with return and cancel URLs.
2

Approval

The payer approves the order on PayPal’s page and is returned.
3

Capture

The order is captured. Only a completed capture records a payment and applies the package — an approved but uncaptured order is not money.
A repeated capture of an order already recorded is rejected as a duplicate rather than credited twice.

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Troubleshooting

For every gateway’s fields in one place, see the credential reference.