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Introduction

PayPal is a global online payment system that allows users to pay for goods and services, send money, and accept payments without revealing their financial details. It’s widely accepted around the world and used by millions of businesses and individuals daily. With Payrails’ direct PayPal integration you can accept payments, create billing agreements with PayPal and charge customers for recurring payments, and implement PayPal either using our SDKs or with a server-to-server integration.

Pre-requisites

In order to use Payrails’ PayPal integration, you need to grant us permission to make requests on behalf of your PayPal merchant account. In order to initiate this process, please contact your Payrails account representative. We will send you a link to a PayPal onboarding page where you can grant us access to make calls on your behalf. Please note that you have to separately connect your sandbox PayPal account and your production account. Before you start accepting PayPal payments with Payrails, there are a few requirements you must meet:

Ways to integrate

Payrails SDK

Server-to-server integration

Parse PayPal from lookup response

Pass PayPal payment method in request to authorize payment with Payrails

Complete the Payment Flow

After initiating the authorization, use the Get an execution by ID endpoint to fetch the execution details. In the API response, locate the requiredAction object (see example below). If present, this indicates that user interaction is required. Extract the requiredAction.href URL from this object.
Redirect the customer to the requiredAction.href URL. They will be taken to the PayPal login page to complete the payment. After the customer completes the payment, Payrails will send a server-to-server notification to your configured webhook endpoint. This payload will contain the holderReferenceand paymentInstrumentId required for performing future recurring (MIT) payments.

Supported regions / countries

Supported workflows and services

PayPal billing agreement

  • Fraud SDKs
Last modified on September 23, 2026