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Getting Started: How to Use PayPal Commerce in Charitable

Are you ready to offer your donors the trusted convenience of PayPal for their donations? Enabling PayPal in Charitable allows you to easily accept contributions using one of the most recognized and reliable payment methods in the world.

With just a few clicks, you can enhance your fundraising efforts and provide a seamless donation experience.

In this guide, we’ll walk you through setting up PayPal as a payment gateway in Charitable, customizing its settings, and ensuring everything is running smoothly, so you can start accepting donations with confidence.

Enable PayPal Payment Gateway

First, to enable PayPal, head to your WordPress admin. Go to Charitable » Settings » Payment Gateways tab. Here, you’ll see the PayPal option along with a button to “Enable Gateway”.

Paypal gateway settings page

When you enable the gateway, a new green “Gateway Settings” button will appear.

At this point, we recommend first turning on Test Mode. This will allow you to set up the gateway safely without any transactions accidentally coming through when you’re not ready. When test mode is active, you should see an alert at the top.

Charitable test mode active alert

Note: If you’re using Charitable Lite, there’s a 3% fee for every transaction along with PayPal charges. To remove the additional 3% charge, you’ll need to upgrade to Charitable Pro.

Connect to Your PayPal Account

Now click on the Gateway Settings to go to the PayPal settings page.

PayPal gateway settings button

On this page, you can now connect to PayPal with a few clicks. There’s absolutely no coding needed.

Start by hitting the green “Connect with PayPal” button.

Connect with PayPal button

This will open up a new page to log in to your PayPal account. Enter your email and follow the onscreen instructions from PayPal.

PayPal login screen

Once you’ve logged in, you’ll see a success message like this. This lets you know that you’re ready to get paid with PayPal on your eCommerce store.

Ready to get paid with paypal

Back in your WordPress site, you’ll see that PayPal Commerce is successfully connected. Charitable also gives you a list of capabilities available to you. These include:

  • Payments Receivable
  • Email Confirmed
  • Advanced Card Processing
  • Apple Pay
  • Google Pay
  • Payment Method Vaulting
  • Fastlane
PayPal connected successfully

Below this, you’ll see more settings and configurations to fine-tune your PayPal Commerce Gateway. We’ll go through the options available here.

Customizing PayPal Commerce Settings

Webhooks

These are the webhooks available for developers to use:

  • CHECKOUT.ORDER.APPROVED
  • PAYMENT.CAPTURE.COMPLETED
  • PAYMENT.CAPTURE.DENIED
  • PAYMENT.CAPTURE.PENDING
  • PAYMENT.CAPTURE.REFUNDED
  • MERCHANT.ONBOARDING.COMPLETED
  • MERCHANT.PARTNER-CONSENT.REVOKED
Webhooks in Charitable

Button Customization

You can change the button color and shape here to match your donation form better. Use the drop down menus to see the options available here.

PayPal payment options button

Enable More Payment Methods

Below the button customization options, you’ll see options to enable Venmo and Pay Later.

  • Venmo is a highly popular mobile payment service owned by PayPal, primarily available only in the United States. It is designed to make it easy to send and receive money directly from your smartphone.
  • “Pay Later” (often referred to broadly as Buy Now, Pay Later, or BNPL) is a type of short-term financing that allows consumers to make purchases and pay for them at a future date, often interest-free.

You can enable these options using the toggle button here.

Enable Venmo and Pay Later in paypal

Next, there are more advanced payment methods. These include:

  • Card Fields (ACDC) – This shows credit and debit card fields directly on your site. It requires Advanced Card Processing approval
  • Apple Pay – This requires Apple Pay approval from PayPal. It will appear to users on the Safari browser on Apple devices.
  • Google Pay – Appears to donors using Chrome or Edge browsers with Google Pay enabled. This requires Google Pay approval from PayPal.
  • Fastlane – Gives you an accelerated checkout for guest users.
Advanced payment methods in paypal settings

All of these options can be enabled/disabled using the toggle button.

Payment Method Vaulting

Payment Method Vaulting (often referred to simply as the PayPal Vault) is a feature used by merchants and businesses to securely save a customer’s payment information for future use.

Instead of a business storing your sensitive credit card or bank account details on their own servers – which is a massive security risk – they use PayPal’s Vault to handle it.

You can enable it using the toggle next to “Enable Payment Method Vaulting”.

When enabled, you can customize the settings thatt include:

  • Vaulting Option Display: This decides how the option to save payment methods appears to users during checkout
  • Auto-vault for Recurring Donations: When enabled, this automatically saves payment methods for recurring donations.
  • Recurring Processing Mode: You can choose Vault+Cron (merchant-managed) or PayPal Subscriptions API (PayPal-managed)
  • Vaulted Method Expiry (in Days): Number of days before stored methods go unused before they expire. You can leave it empty if you don’t want this data to expire.
PayPal payment method vaulting

Once you’re done making changes, make sure you save changes before exiting this page.

Testing Your Donation Form with PayPal Commerce

We recommend running test transactions to ensure your transactions go through. Open any Charitable campaign, select an amount you want to donate. Scroll to the payment section and you should see PayPal appear like so:

Choose your preferred payment method and complete your donation.

PayPal Commerce donation form

Once your donation is successful, your receipt will appear.

Here’s a sample:

Charitable PayPal receipt

Check Donation Records

Head over to Charitable » Donations. You can view the donation record list here. Choose the one you just made.

On the next page, you’ll see the Donation Details. This will show you the Payment method and the log which bears all the details of the Prder ID, PayPal capture ID, and gateway transaction ID.

Donation record with PayPal details

On the right panel of this screen, you’ll see Donation Actions.

Using the drop-down menu, you can choose to refund the donation

Check the box that reads “Refund in PayPal Commerce automatically.”

Then “Update Status” here.

This will ensure that the donation is refunded directly through PayPal.

Refund in paypal

When you’re done testing PayPal with Charitable, make sure you turn off Test Mode. Now live donations can come through to your non-profit.

Disconnecting PayPal Commerce

To disconnect PayPal, return to Charitable » Payment Gateways, click on the “Gateway Settings” next to PayPal.

On this page, find the “Disconnect Account” button under Connection Status.

Disconnect PayPal

Disabling the PayPal Gateway

To disable the PayPal gateway, go to Charitable » Payment Gateways. Next to PayPal, you can click on the “Disable Gateway” button.

Disable PayPal gateway

That’s it. You’ve learned how to set up and manage PayPal as a payment gateway in Charitable. Next, you may also want to learn about payment gateways:

You may also want to read our guide on Understanding Nonprofit Platform and Processing Fees (And How to Minimize Them) »

Need support? Have a question? If you are a lite/free user of Charitable, you can reach out to our team on the WordPress.org support forums. If you have an active license, feel to reach out us directly for priority support.

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ambassadors New

🖨️ Introducing Fliers and Posters: Raise Money Away From the Screen!

A lot of peer-to-peer fundraising happens away from a screen: at the finish line of a 5K, on a school noticeboard, in an office kitchen. Charitable Ambassadors 3.4.7 adds 2 printables, a fundraiser flier carrying each fundraiser’s own story and QR code, and a recruitment poster that signs new fundraisers up. Both open as a normal web page and print straight from the browser. Why this is important:

  • 🏁 A flier for every fundraiser: Each one carries that fundraiser’s own photo, story and goal, with a QR code that opens their page rather than your main campaign.
  • 📌 A poster that recruits: It shows “Now Recruiting” above your campaign name with a large QR code that opens your sign-up form, so someone can start fundraising without waiting on a link from you.
  • 🪄 No design tool needed: Both printables render as a normal web page and print from the browser, with no PDF plugin and no designer.
  • 📄 2 flier layouts: Hand out carries the full story for giving to friends and family, and Post up carries a short hook with 5 tear-off tabs for a noticeboard.
  • 🛡️ Off until you switch it on: Fliers stay off after the update until you enable them under Charitable » Ambassadors » Other » Fliers, and only the owner or an administrator can open one.

Check out our announcement here.

Improvement Payments

💸 Introducing Tiered Rates for Fee Relief: Match the Ask to the Gift!

Fee Relief asks your donors one short question at checkout: would you like to cover the processing fee on this gift? Until now that question used a single rate for every donation on a gateway, so a $10 gift and a $500 gift were asked for the same percentage. Fee Relief 1.3.0 lets you set as many donation bands as you like, each carrying its own rate. Why this is important:

  • 🪙 Gentler on small gifts: A fixed transaction cost is a far bigger share of a $10 donation than a $500 one, so bands let you ask for less at the bottom.
  • 🎚️ As many bands as you need: Each band carries its own percentage and its own fixed amount, and the top band runs on with no upper limit.
  • 🛑 An optional ceiling: A Maximum fee field stops any donor being asked for more than a number you choose, however large the gift.
  • 🔌 Set per payment gateway: Stripe can run on four bands while Windcave and Payfast stay on a single rate, because bands belong to a gateway and not to your whole site.
  • 🛡️ Nothing changes until you say so: Your current rates stay exactly as they are until you switch Use Tiered Rates on under Charitable » Settings » Advanced » Fee Relief.

Check out our announcement here.

Donations Improvement

📊 Your Pro Dashboard Can Now Compare, Export, and Score!

Most fundraising dashboards only tell you how much you have raised. Charitable Pro 1.8.19 rebuilds the dashboard and the Reports Overview around the harder questions: whether anything is broken, whether this period beat the last one, and which single change would make the most difference today. Why this is important:

  • 📈 Every figure has a trend: Pick a period and the tiles and the chart move together, with each total shown against the previous period.
  • 🗓️ Charts that stay readable: Short ranges group donations day by day, while longer ranges group by week or month, so a full year reads as a curve instead of a flat line.
  • 🔀 Compare any 2 periods: Not just consecutive ones, so you can ask how this December did against last December. That matters because fundraising is seasonal.
  • 📤 Export the whole summary: Send the full overview out as CSV or PDF, ready for a board pack or a funder report.
  • 🎯 Score your setup for free: Have your fundraising setup scored, so the one change worth making next is the one you can see.

Check out our announcement here.

Feature New

🎟️ Introducing Charitable Events: Sell Tickets Inside Your Campaigns!

Most nonprofits sell event tickets in one tool and collect donations in another, which leaves two sets of reports and a manual match at the end of the year. Charitable Events brings both together, selling tickets through the same donation forms and payment gateways you already run in Charitable. Why this is important:

  • 🎟️ Every ticket is a donation: Ticket sales run through the gateway you already use and count toward the campaign goal, with everything managed under Charitable » Events.
  • 📱 QR check-in from any phone: Each attendee gets their own QR code on the receipt, and volunteers scan at the door through a check-in link that needs no WordPress account.
  • 🧾 Receipts ready for tax time: Give each ticket type a fair market value, and Charitable puts the correct tax-deductible amount on every donor receipt.
  • 📋 Attendee details at checkout: Ask every guest for a meal choice, shirt size, or access needs, with a separate attendee record created for each ticket.
  • 🗓️ Blocks and calendars included: Three editor blocks plus Sugar Calendar and The Events Calendar support put your events where supporters already look.

Check out our announcement here.

ai New

🚀 Unleash AI Power in Charitable!

Your AI assistant can now build, edit, and manage your Charitable fundraising campaigns directly — just by asking. With Charitable Pro adding write support for the WordPress Abilities API, tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Cursor can handle full administrative actions safely through MCP. Why this is important:

  • 🤖 Campaign creation in plain language: Prompt your assistant with a goal like “Set up a fundraiser for the shelter with a $5,000 goal”, and it builds a real draft campaign complete with suggested donation tiers.
  • 🎨 Instant donation form tweaks: Add custom fields, change button colors, or reorder elements without diving into form settings.
  • 📝 Offline gift logging: Tell your assistant about cash or check gifts, and it will match donor emails and record transactions into your history.
  • 🛡️ Safety and control by default: Write access stays strictly off until turned on in Charitable » Tools » AI MCP, keeping read-only reporting safe by default.
  • 📜 Full audit logging: Every change made by an AI assistant is tracked under Charitable » Tools » Logs, so you always know who (or what) updated your site.

Check out our announcement here.

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