Ignition PayPal Gateway

Ignition PayPal Gateway lets backers pay online with PayPal — or a credit or debit card processed by PayPal — instead of only the manual offline methods core ships with. Pledges settle automatically as soon as the backer completes payment. If you run a multi-creator platform, it can also split each pledge directly to the campaign’s own creator — see Splitting pledges with your creators.

Ignition PayPal Gateway is a premium add-on. It requires Ignition Crowdfunding 0.22.0 or later and a PayPal Business account. Once you activate it from the Plugins screen and connect your account (below), PayPal appears as a payment option at checkout.

Connecting your PayPal account

PayPal is configured on the Payments tab under Ignition > Settings, alongside the built-in Offline method. Click Configure → on its row to open the PayPal screen. A Settings link on PayPal’s row on the Plugins screen goes to the same place.

You provide two sets of API credentials — a Live pair and a Sandbox pair — each a Client ID and Secret from your PayPal Business account. Sandbox credentials let you rehearse the full payment flow with PayPal’s test accounts before taking real money.

After saving, use the connection test to confirm the credentials actually authenticate with PayPal, so a mistyped key surfaces during setup rather than at a backer’s checkout. The Accept PayPal switch sits at the top of the same screen — you set PayPal up and switch it on in one place.

Live vs. sandbox — chosen per campaign

There is no site-wide test-mode switch. The environment is selected automatically for each pledge, from the campaign it belongs to:

A pledge to a test campaign uses your Sandbox credentials.
A pledge to a real campaign uses your Live credentials.

So you can test PayPal end to end on a test campaign while real campaigns keep taking live payments — nothing to toggle.

Payment-notification status

The PayPal settings page shows a read-only status for each environment (Live, then Sandbox), telling you in plain language whether PayPal can reach your site to report payment results. A healthy status means captures and refunds sync automatically; a warning tells you to resolve it before backers pay. Local or development sites that PayPal cannot reach are flagged here up front.

Splitting pledges with your creators

By default, every pledge is paid into your own PayPal account, exactly as described above. On a multi-creator platform you can have each pledge paid directly to the campaign’s own creator instead, with your platform taking an optional cut of each transaction.

Splitting is built on PayPal for Marketplaces. The split happens at PayPal the moment a backer pays — the creator receives their share in their own PayPal account, and your platform receives its cut, with no manual payouts to run afterward. To the backer, paying a split pledge looks exactly like any other PayPal payment. Where and when that cut actually lands isn’t always what you’d expect — see Where your platform’s cut goes.

What you need

Splitting pledges requires:

The Ignition Platform Mode add-on, active, with its Who Receives Pledges setting set to Each creator. Without the add-on there is no such choice and PayPal always pays you.
A PayPal Platform REST app (created in the PayPal Developer Dashboard), separate from the Merchant credentials used when you collect centrally. You provide its Client ID, Secret, and your own PayPal Account ID for each environment — live and sandbox — on the PayPal settings page.

Choosing who gets paid

PayPal has no setting of its own for this. Who receives a pledge is a decision about your whole site, not about one payment method, so it is made once under Ignition → Settings → Add-ons → Platform Mode — see Who receives pledges. Every payment method follows it.

The PayPal settings page follows it too, by showing only the credentials that choice actually needs: Merchant credentials when pledges come to you, Platform credentials and your Account ID when they go to creators. Each has its own live and sandbox pair with a per-environment connection test. You are never asked to fill in a set of keys the site will not use.

An availability panel on the same page explains, in plain language, exactly which conditions a campaign must meet for PayPal to be offered.

How your creators connect

Each creator connects their own PayPal account from their dashboard, under Account → PayPal. They click through PayPal’s own onboarding — no copying of keys or secrets — and can use either a PayPal Business account or a personal one. Once a creator’s account is confirmed as able to receive funds, their campaigns can offer PayPal. You can see each creator’s connection status in the Creators list in wp-admin.

Split-or-nothing

PayPal is offered on a campaign only when its creator has connected and can actually be paid. If a creator hasn’t connected — or their account can’t currently receive funds — PayPal is simply hidden for that campaign, and backers use the other available methods. A pledge is never quietly routed to your own account instead of the creator’s: a split either happens correctly or PayPal steps aside.

Why PayPal isn’t offered on a campaign

With Ignition Crowdfunding 0.23.0 or later, a campaign’s page in wp-admin lists its payment methods, and when PayPal is hidden it says why in plain language. It lists every reason at once, not just the first, so you can fix them all in one go. For example:

the campaign uses fixed funding;
the Live or Sandbox credentials are missing, or, when creators receive pledges, the Platform credentials or your Platform Account ID are missing;
the campaign has no creator;
the creator hasn’t connected PayPal for that environment, has connected but PayPal can’t send them payments yet, or PayPal didn’t send their account ID.

Each message names the creator where it matters and says whether it is about Live or Sandbox. On a test campaign, a credential reason starts with “This is a test campaign, so PayPal uses Sandbox”, so you know why it asks for Sandbox credentials when you have only saved Live ones. Reasons you fix in the PayPal settings carry a link there, shown to administrators only. No saved credential is ever shown.

This is separate from the availability panel on the PayPal settings page, which describes the conditions in general rather than for one campaign.

Where your platform’s cut goes — and when you’ll see it

Your cut is split off the moment the backer pays — there’s no payout for you to run. But PayPal doesn’t leave it sitting as a growing balance in your PayPal account. It’s paid out on PayPal’s normal payout schedule for your account — typically consolidated once a day to your linked bank account, so a day’s platform fees settle together (usually the following day) rather than showing up one pledge at a time. Don’t expect your PayPal balance to tick up with every pledge; the money moves through to your bank.

Testing platform mode in the sandbox? Don’t be alarmed if your platform sandbox account looks like it received nothing. The cut is being taken from each pledge correctly — but PayPal’s sandbox surfaces it only as those daily bank transfers, and its transaction reports can lag a few hours behind. This is a known quirk of PayPal’s sandbox, not a sign your setup is wrong. To confirm the cut is really being collected, look at the account’s transaction (or activity) report — where the daily transfers appear — rather than its balance, which stays flat because the money passes straight through to the bank.

Refunds on a split pledge

You issue refunds the same way no matter who received the money. For a split pledge, PayPal automatically reverses your platform’s cut in proportion to the amount refunded — a full refund reverses the whole fee, a partial refund reverses part of it — so the creator and your platform each give back their share.

How backers pay

On a campaign that offers PayPal, a backer chooses Pay with PayPal at checkout and is taken to PayPal’s own hosted page to approve the payment. After approving, they return to your site and the pledge is confirmed. Because payment details are entered on PayPal’s pages, no card data ever touches your site. Both signed-in backers and guests can pay with PayPal.

Only on flexible-funding campaigns

In this version PayPal is offered only on flexible-funding (keep-what-you-raise) campaigns. On fixed-funding (all-or-nothing) campaigns PayPal is hidden and backers use the offline methods instead — because PayPal captures money immediately, and charging backers before an all-or-nothing goal is met would be premature. A future version will support holding the payment until the goal is reached. A fixed-funding campaign’s page in wp-admin says this is why PayPal is not offered — see Why PayPal isn’t offered on a campaign.

Finishing an interrupted payment

If a backer closes the PayPal window or their payment fails, the pledge is left pending rather than lost. On the backer’s dashboard — both the pledges list and the individual pledge — a pending PayPal pledge shows an honest status and a Complete payment action that takes them back through PayPal to finish. A pledge that is never completed is canceled automatically after a period of inactivity, so it doesn’t linger.

Refunds

You issue refunds exactly as you do for any pledge — from the pledge’s Issue refund action in wp-admin, full or partial. For a PayPal pledge the refund is sent to PayPal and returned to the backer’s original payment method, and the pledge’s refund status updates automatically once PayPal confirms it. See Refunds for the general refund workflow.

Cancel or refund?

If PayPal may already have taken the money for a pending pledge, the site will not let you cancel it. You see “This pledge may already have been paid at PayPal. Refund it instead of cancelling.” Cancelling would lose track of a real charge, so refund the pledge instead. Once a pledge is cancelled, a late payment notification from PayPal can no longer charge it.

What PayPal keeps

PayPal takes a processing fee out of every payment before the money reaches you. That fee is not something your site can work out for itself — it varies with the payer’s country, their funding source and your own PayPal pricing — so the add-on asks PayPal directly. The moment a payment completes, it reads back what PayPal actually settled: the fee PayPal kept, the amount it worked from, and, on a split pledge, the cut it passed to your platform. Those figures are recorded against the payment.

Where the fee appears

The pledge page in wp-admin — Open Ignition → Pledges and click View on a PayPal pledge. Its Where it went table shows a Processing (gateway) line with the fee for that payment.
Net figures — The net for a PayPal pledge has the fee taken off, everywhere a net is shown: the Pledges list, the pledge page and the exports. A creator’s own dashboard pledge table lists the amount charged rather than a net, so nothing is subtracted there.
Pledge exports — The Processing Fee column carries what PayPal kept, beside the net.

Until PayPal has reported a fee for a payment, none of this is invented. The Processing (gateway) line is simply absent, the export cell is left empty, and the Net row carries the note The payment processor has not reported its fee for this pledge. An empty export cell means “not reported”, not “no fee was charged”.

Because PayPal keeps its fee even when you refund a pledge in full, a fully refunded PayPal pledge settles at a small negative net. That is expected, and When a refund leaves you below zero explains it.

When PayPal cannot be reached

Reading the settlement figures is a separate request to PayPal, made just after the payment is confirmed. If that request fails — a network blip, a momentary PayPal outage — the payment itself is unaffected: the backer has been charged and the pledge is paid. Only the fee figures are missing, and the surfaces above say so rather than guessing.

A background check runs twice a day and fills the gaps in. Each run picks up to 25 payments that still have no settlement figures, newest first, from the last 30 days, and reads them from PayPal. If your PayPal credentials have been changed or revoked, the run stops instead of repeating a request that cannot succeed, and resumes once working credentials are saved.

The check is scheduled for you while the add-on is active, and removed when you deactivate it. There is nothing to configure.

Receipts and emails

A backer paying with PayPal sees a “Paid” confirmation on their receipt in place of the offline “how to pay” instructions. The pledge-confirmation and payment emails are core’s standard emails, sent at the moment the payment is actually captured.

Privacy

The add-on records PayPal-specific details for each payment (such as the PayPal order and payer identifiers) so refunds and status updates can be matched up. This information is included when you export a user’s personal data, removed when you erase it, and deleted if you uninstall the add-on.

In platform mode, a creator’s PayPal connection details (their PayPal merchant ID, account email and environment) are included in the same export and removed on erasure.

Payments — The Payments settings tab, where gateways are configured and enabled.
Ignition Platform Mode — Required for pledge splitting; turns the site into a multi-creator platform and owns the Who Receives Pledges setting.
Administration → Add-ons — Managing add-ons and reaching their settings.
Refunds — Issuing full and partial refunds.
When a refund leaves you below zero — Why a fully refunded card pledge nets a small negative figure.
Test campaigns — How test campaigns work; they drive PayPal’s sandbox environment.