PayPal Payouts offers an easy solution to pay multiple people at the same time. SliceWP integrates with PayPal to facilitate mass payments directly from your WordPress dashboard and into your affiliates’ PayPal accounts.
All this functionality is provided through the PayPal Payouts add-on, which you can download from your account if you have an active SliceWP license. If you’re not sure how to install a SliceWP add-on, this walkthrough will guide you every step of the way.
If you have everything ready to go, it’s time to link SliceWP to PayPal and pay affiliates.
On this page:
- Prerequisites
- Connecting your PayPal sandbox application (for testing purposes).
- Connecting your PayPal live application (for live payments).
- Paying affiliates through PayPal Payouts.
- Debugging PayPal Payouts issues.
Prerequisites
Before you can pay your affiliates via PayPal, directly from your WordPress website, you’ll need the following:
- A PayPal business account.
- Access to PayPal’s Payouts feature.
- A confirmed identity, email, and bank account linked to your PayPal business account.
- Sufficient funds in your PayPal business account.
Click here to learn more about the PayPal Payout prerequisites.
Important note: The Payouts feature is disabled by default for your PayPal business account. To enable it, you’ll need to contact PayPal directly and request access to the feature. Click here for more details.
Connecting your PayPal sandbox application
To make sure everything is working correctly, we recommend testing the PayPal Payouts functionality using a sandbox application. To do this, please follow the steps below to connect your PayPal application to SliceWP:
- Firstly, log into your PayPal developer dashboard and navigate to My Apps and Credentials page.
- Make sure your are viewing your Sandbox applications.
- If you don’t already have a sandbox REST API app, please create one. If you do, click on the one you want to connect to SliceWP to view its details.
- Copy the Client ID and Secret strings from your PayPal developer dashboard and paste them into your WordPress admin area > SliceWP > Settings > General (tab) > PayPal Credentials (section), in the fields prefixed with Test.
Quick note: To process test payouts make sure to enable the Test Mode option found in your WordPress dashboard > SliceWP > Settings > General (tab) > PayPal Credentials (section).
Connecting your PayPal live application
To be able to process actual payments from your PayPal account to your affiliates’ PayPal accounts, you will need to connect a live PayPal REST API app to SliceWP. To do this, follow the steps below:
- Firstly, log into your PayPal developer dashboard and navigate to My Apps and Credentials page.
- Make sure your are viewing your Live applications.
- If you don’t already have a live REST API app, please create one. If you do, click on the one you want to connect to SliceWP to view its details.
- Copy the Client ID and Secret strings from your PayPal developer dashboard and paste them into your WordPress admin area > SliceWP > Settings > General (tab) > PayPal Credentials (section), in the fields prefixed with Live.
Paying affiliates through PayPal Payouts
Once you connect your PayPal business account to SliceWP, you can start sending affiliate payments directly from your WordPress dashboard.
Everything is handled through SliceWP’s payouts system, as follows:
- Navigate to your WordPress dashboard > SliceWP > Payouts.
- If you already have a payout that hasn’t been paid, navigate to its View page. If you don’t yet have a payout waiting, go ahead and create a new payout. For more details on how to create a payout in SliceWP, please follow this step-by-step guide.
- Once in a payout’s view page, under the Payout Progress section, you should see a drop-down field Select payout method…. Click it and select the PayPal Payouts option.
- The final step is to click the Pay Affiliates button and confirm the process.
Important note: Once you confirm the payment, PayPal will send an email notifying your affiliates of the payment.
If your affiliates don’t have a PayPal account, they will be notified they need to create one in order to receive the payment. PayPal will hold these payments for 30 days. During this time, the payments in SliceWP will be shown as Unclaimed.
If your affiliates don’t register for a PayPal account in this time frame, any money due to them will be returned to your PayPal account.
Debugging PayPal Payouts issues
As with any integration, issues can occur. To help you better understand what is happening behind the scenes, SliceWP comes with a debug logger. In it, you will have success and error messages on the different processes the plugin runs.
We recommend you to enable the logger, if you’re facing any issue. Here’s how to do it:
- Navigate to your WordPress dashboard > SliceWP > Settings > Tools (tab).
- Here, under the Debug Log section, please switch on the Enable Logging option. After you save the settings, a text area should appear, where logged messages will appear.
Here are the most common errors you can see in the debug log for PayPal Payouts:
- PayPal Payouts API: get_access_token() failed. Response code: 400: The format of the data sent to PayPal isn’t what PayPal expects. This could be an incompatibility issue between SliceWP and PayPal. Please contact us if you see this error.
- PayPal Payouts API: get_access_token() failed. Response code: 401: This usually means that your API keys haven’t been set properly in SliceWP. Please follow the steps provided in the above sections to set everything up.
- PayPal Payouts API: get_access_token() failed. Response code: 403: In most cases this means that your PayPal account doesn’t have the Payouts feature enabled. Please make sure to follow PayPal’s prerequisites and then try again.