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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.

Jen avatar
Written by Jen
Updated over a week ago

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

Your customers won't usually require a PayPal account to pay via PayPal. Instead, they can pay with their credit/debit card as a guest payment.

This article covers:


Exceptions

There are two exceptions to this option:

  1. In some countries, even with a PayPal Business account, PayPal will require your customers to pay using a PayPal account.

  2. The customer has had a lifetime spend of over £1900.00 using PayPal guest checkout, meaning they must use a PayPal account for further transactions.

With PayPal Express, the default is set to ask customers to log in to PayPal (or to create a new PayPal Account). However, you may prefer to give your customers the option of paying with a card immediately.

  • This function is only available if you have linked your credit card to your PayPal account.


Enabling an optional PayPal account

Firstly, log in to your Business PayPal account, then select your profile in the top right corner, then select Account settings:

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

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

Once completed, please ensure to save your changes.


Additional notes

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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