WHMCS 8.9 introduces 2 new PayPal integrations, both of which take advantage of the very latest integration technologies from PayPal to deliver the best possible end user checkout and payments experience.

In today's post, we are going to focus on the first of these new integrations, named "PayPal Payments", which is designed for PayPal's Branded Checkout experience and enables customers to pay for services using their PayPal account.

A new PayPal integration module named "PayPal Payments". This integration will replace the PayPal Basic and PayPal Checkout modules that exist today as the recommended PayPal integration for all WHMCS merchants wanting to transact using PayPal.

The PayPal Payments integration available in WHMCS 8.9 and later provides a streamlined checkout experience that utilises PayPal's latest modal based checkout experience to provided an on-site checkout experience, coupled with PayPal Vaulting to enable faster checkout and fully automated recurring billing for products & services.

With PayPal Vaulting, end users are able to pay using PayPal and grant permission for future charges to be made to their PayPal account by your WHMCS instance.

This enables WHMCS to offer a streamlined checkout experience for repeat customers where they don't need to re-authenticate with PayPal to perform subsequent checkouts, as well as to allow WHMCS to perform charges against a PayPal account on-demand for fully automated recurring billing.

PayPal Vaulting is the next evolution of PayPal Billing Agreements, a functionality which previously was available to selected merchants only. With PayPal Vaulting, the majority of WHMCS merchants will be able to benefit from and take advantage of this new capability.

In previous integrations, WHMCS has utilised PayPal Subscriptions for recurring billing via PayPal. While PayPal Subscriptions have served us well for many years, as the needs of service provider businesses and their customers using WHMCS have evolved, more flexibility is needed to accommodate things such as orders with multiple products spanning different billing periods, the rise in products and services where charges are based on usage or other external factors, as well as the growing commonality for upgrades during a subscription lifetime.

Through PayPal Vaulting, end users can grant authorization for merchants to charge their PayPal accounts on-demand, even in their absence. This grants WHMCS a secure token stored for subsequent use to initiate charges on a buyer's PayPal account.

This functionality empowers WHMCS to assume complete control over the payment collection process. It allows for the capture of payments on-demand and automatically supports all billing functionalities and subscription terms compatible with WHMCS.

PayPal Vaulting is progressively being implemented on a regional and country-specific basis, and the list of supported countries is evolving frequently.

At the time of writing, PayPal Vault is available for the following countries: United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Australia and a range of EU Countries: BE (Belgium), BG (Bulgaria), CY (Republic of Cyprus), CZ (Czech Republic), DE(Germany), DK (Denmark), EE (Estonia), ES (Spain), FI (Finland), FR (France), GR (Greece), HU (Hungary), IT (Italy), LT (Lithuania), LU (Luxembourg), LV (Latvia), MT (Malta), NL (Netherland), PL (Poland), PT (Portugal), RO (Romania), SE (Sweden), SI (Slovenia), SK (Slovakia)

To verify if PayPal Vault is available for your PayPal account region, we recommend simply activating and configuring the new PayPal Payments integration in WHMCS 8.9 or later, and the WHMCS Payment Gateways configuration UI will provide a feature indicator confirming whether Vault functionality is available and activated for your connected PayPal account.


With the new PayPal Payments integration, you benefit from:

1. Faster Checkout - A simplified experience that allows customers to authorize charges for all their products and services through a one-time agreement workflow.
2. Branded Checkout - A modal based experience that means customers don't leave your website to complete the payment authorisation with PayPal.
3. Complete Billing - No matter the term or pricing, with a PayPal Payments vaulted payment method, you get total flexibility of amount and term.
4. Optimised Recurring Billing Experience - No more subscription challenges and inconvenience such as over or under-payments, or duplicate billings.
5. Optimised Upsells - With authorisation in place, existing customers can checkout faster and pay with PayPal without needing to re-login or re-authenticate with PayPal.
6. Secure Tokenisation - your WHMCS instance receives a secure tokenised link to the users PayPal account which is used for repeat charges.
We are recommending that all merchants using PayPal with WHMCS activate and begin accepting payments via the new PayPal Payments integration after upgrading to WHMCS 8.9 or later.

Existing PayPal Subscriptions will continue unaffected and uninterrupted. Our recommendation is that service providers with existing PayPal subscriptions do not make any proactive changes. Rather, existing subscriptions be allowed to continue until their natural expiry. Functionality will be available in WHMCS to help seamlessly transition customers over to the new PayPal Payments experience when and only when their next manual PayPal payment interaction is required, avoiding any risk to existing revenue.

Further details about this recommended migration path and technical details of how it has been designed will be provided later as we near the General Availability release.

WHMCS 8.9 was released to Beta at the beginning of this month, and work is ongoing to refine and deliver further functional improvements for the Release Candidate and subsequent General Availability releases. We anticipate progressing to RC and GA release statuses early in the new year.

To learn more about WHMCS 8.9 and both of the new PayPal integrations, as well as how to get involved in the beta, you can visit the WHMCS 8.9 Preview Site @ https://preview.whmcs.com/