In addition to Stripe and Square, you can now use PayPal to allow your clients to pay your invoices and purchase your Offerings.

CoachAccountable’s support for PayPal has been a bit of a winding path.  PayPal was the original and only payment processor one could choose for client invoice payments for several years.  It was phased out in favor of Stripe and Square, both of which had better support for in-app payments (as opposed to the need to bounce on over to paypal.com), and the ability to save client cards on file for later invoices.  The former advantage was especially nice for Offerings, and the later for automatic recurring payments in coaching Engagements.

We really wanted every payment processor option to be on even footing, meaning we didn’t want some users to have less functionality available than others based on that choice.  Everyone using PayPal was grandfathered in, but we removed it as an option to steer folks towards Stripe and Square for what they made possible with Offerings and Engagements.

AND YET, it turns out that years later, with the growing CoachAccountable customer base in an increasingly varied set of countries, for many Stripe and Square simply aren’t options due to more limited country support.

So, in spite of the limitations, the time has come for PayPal to rejoin the ranks of payment processors supported by CoachAccountable.

Let’s see how it works!

As always, you choose your payment processor from the Settings >> Client Invoice Config page:

A fine choice if it’s the only one available, but do mind the notice in red!

Despite having more coverage, globally, even PayPal supports billing only in select currencies.  If you try to choose PayPal while having selected a currency that is not supported, the system will alert you of as much.

Instead of entering payment details in-app, like with the others, a button will whisk your customers off to PayPal to complete the transaction.  In the case of Offerings, this is a pop up window, like so:

It appears more centered than that–I just wanted to show off a little more of what’s going on. :)

PayPal offers a few trade-offs from the other payment processors.  For one, one needn’t even have a PayPal account to get started: you can simply enter your email address.  Whenever you get your first payment this way, PayPal will let you know you’ve got money, and guide you through the steps to retrieve it (and set up your account in the process).

Your customers going to PayPal means they can pay in alternative ways to just a credit card, like bank transfers or with their PayPal balance.  Though not guaranteed, this opens up the possibility of you collecting on your invoices without being subject to the usual merchant processor fees.  (The flip side of this, of course, is that the activity of making the payment is all happening at the PayPal side of things, and thus there’s no way for you, as a merchant, to store information about their payment instruments for later payments.)

Overall it works fine, both to allow your new clients to purchase your Offerings and your established clients to pay your invoices.  We recommend Stripe or Square over PayPal for the aforementioned reasons, but to all of those for whom those aren’t an option, PayPal’s got you covered!