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Allow your customers to pay without a PayPal account
Allow your customers to pay without a PayPal account

How to change PayPal settings to ensure you can also accept card payments.

Anni avatar
Written by Anni
Updated over 2 weeks ago

✨ Please note: Online payments are available on the Lite plan or above.

Your customers typically won't need a PayPal account to pay through PayPal. Instead, they can make a guest payment using their credit or debit card.

This article covers:


Exceptions

There are two exceptions to the guest payment option:

  1. In some countries, even with a PayPal Business account, PayPal may require customers to use a PayPal account for payment.

  2. If a customer has spent over £1900.00 via PayPal's guest checkout, they must use a PayPal account for all future transactions.

With PayPal Express, the default is to prompt customers to log in to their PayPal account (or create one). However, if you prefer to offer card payment as an option immediately, you can do this if your credit card is linked to your PayPal account.


Enabling an optional PayPal account

To enable an optional PayPal account:

  1. Select your profile in the top right corner, then select Account settings:

    PayPal account with an arrow pointing at the account name

  2. On the right-hand side, select Website payments. From the options, select Update next to Website preferences:

    PayPal account with an arrow pointing at the 'Website payments' and 'Update' sections

  3. Scroll down to PayPal account optional and select this option to On:

    Paypal settings with an arrow pointing at the 'on' button under 'PayPal account optional'

  4. Once completed, save your changes.


Why some customers may still need to sign up with PayPal

Even with the above setting activated, we still hear reports from businesses using PayPal that their customers must sign up with it. This can depend on the customer's personal PayPal history (even if they are not logged in—based on cookies or IP address) to prevent too many ongoing guest checkouts, and PayPal then pushes to create an account.

We have made all attempts with PayPal to ensure this doesn't happen. However, PayPal controls this process, and they can still decide to offer non-card options from time to time. If this is a persistent issue with your account, we recommend changing your payment provider to Stripe, which offers card-only checkouts.

💡 PayPal has recently enforced that all purchases must be made via a PayPal account in Australia.


💬 Any questions or feedback? There are two ways to get in touch:

Thank you! 🕺

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