How to Put Your WP E-commerce Site into Sandbox Mode with PayPal Payments Standard

A sometimes buggy WP E-commerce combined with a lack of documentation on how to use and troubleshoot the plugin make working with the WP E-commerce for WordPress plugin tricky at best. I’ve done a lot of work with the plugin over the past year, and will begin sharing some of that insight here on the site from time to time. First up? Getting PayPal Payments Standard into Sandbox mode.

Put PayPal Payments Standard into Sandbox Mode for WP E-commerce 

While PayPal Payments Pro and PayPal Express Checkout offer options to use Sandbox mode for testing (vs. production mode, where actual payments are process), PayPal Payments Standard in WP E-commerce does not make it so clear as to how to move into the testing environment. It is possible though, and here’s how to do it.

  1. Login to https://developer.paypal.com with your PayPal Developer Account
  2. Click on API Credentials
  3. Copy your Test Account email address.
  4. In WP E-commerce’s PayPal Payments Standard settings, paste the Test Account into the Username field.
  5. For URL, use https://www.sandbox.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr
  6. Click Update in that panel.

Remember to switch back to your live credentials when you actually want to start accepting payments. Best of luck with WP E-commerce and PayPal!

Up Next: What if Mexico was just another Canada?