PayPal Express Checkout customer experience

PayPal Express Checkout is an accelerated checkout that keeps customers on your site while placing an order on your store, helping optimize your online checkout. PayPal Express Checkout allows customers to save their payment details for future purchases, providing them with a faster checkout process.

Understand how PayPal Express Checkout works

To pay for an order using PayPal Express Checkout, a customer goes through the following steps:

1. When a customer visits your online store and adds items to their cart, they can opt to use PayPal Express Checkout.
2. Customers proceed by logging into their PayPal accounts to review and confirm their purchases.
3. After logging in, customers finalize their transactions securely.

Note

Buyer credit is available only for your customers with PayPal accounts based in the United States or the United Kingdom. There's no additional setup required to activate buyer credit for your customers.

Address handling in PayPal Express Checkout

PayPal automatically fills the billing address fields with the customer's shipping address during checkout. Customers can edit this information by clicking Change....

Shopify sends only one address to PayPal, typically the shipping address. This setup is unchangeable because there's no way for Shopify to know ahead of time whether the customer has a PayPal account. As a result, Shopify can't send the billing address, such as when the customer is paying with a credit card instead.

When using PayPal Express Checkout as an accelerated checkout payment solution, your customers billing address might be missing when they select local pickup.

Shopify Plus

Shopify Plus stores can work with a developer or Shopify Partner to make advanced customizations to their checkout.

Activating guest payments

By default, PayPal Express Checkout prompts customers to log in or create a PayPal account. However, in certain regions, you can activate guest payments to allow customers to pay with their credit cards without a PayPal account. To activate this feature, link your credit card to your PayPal business account and then adjust the settings in your PayPal account accordingly. Learn more about setting up guest payments on your checkout page at PayPal. To confirm whether you can activate guest payments in a certain country or region, contact the PayPal support team.

Requiring phone numbers for PayPal Express Checkout orders

When using PayPal Express Checkout and relying on customer contact details, you might notice that the phone number field is missing from Shopify's order details page. If you choose to make the phone number a required field in PayPal, then you should ensure that the required fields in Shopify Checkout match those in PayPal to avoid connection errors.

While requesting a phone number can improve communication, it might also discourage some customers from completing their purchases. If the phone number isn't essential for your business operations, then you might want to consider making it an optional field to facilitate a seamless checkout process.

To require customer phone numbers through your PayPal account settings, you must have a PayPal business account. You can adjust this setting by logging into your PayPal account and configuring the phone number requirement accordingly.

Steps:

1. Log in to your PayPal account at paypal.com.
2. Click the gear icon and select Account Settings.
3. Click Website payments.
4. Beside Website preferences, click Update.
5. In Contact telephone number, choose an option for Contact telephone:
   • On (Optional Field): Adds the phone number field without making it mandatory.
   • On (Required Field): Makes the phone number mandatory during checkout.
   • Off: Removes the phone number field entirely.