• There are quite a few different layers to the PayPal SDK

  • The core interface is the PayPal REST API

  • PayPal have a JavaScript SDK which provides a wrapper over the REST API.

    • This wrapper also provides UI for PayPal checkout buttons and, hosted fields for users to supply their debit/credit card details

  The core PayPal JS SDK package can not be downloaded from NPM, it has to be included as a script tag in your web app. This is mainly for security purposes

  • There are some performance challenges to loading the PayPal JavaScript SDK in a non-blocking way for websites. Though the docs, do provide some strategies to optimise the loading of the script . These implementations can be error prone. Therefore PayPal also provide paypal-js . This is a PayPal helper utility which helps load the PayPal JS SDK in an optimal way and provides, namespace to render the PayPal UI elements.

    This utility simply needs a config object and it handles the hard work of injecting the PayPal JS SDK script efficiently.

  Note: use client-id=sb to use the PayPal sandbox mode

  • react-paypal-js is a wrapper for payPal-js , which provides a react PayPalScriptProvider and react components for PayPal UI and also some hooks for tapping into the script state. This provides a much more idiomatic react interface to work with.

Sandbox environment🔗

• if you have signed up to developers.paypal.com using your personal account, this will only let you use the PayPal SDK in sandbox mode.
• You need a PayPal business account to use the the live mode of the SDK. In theory, all you need to do is swap your client-id to a production id everything should work as expected.

Using Sandbox users🔗

• Sandbox users are found under https://developer.paypal.com/developer/applications , after you have created an app.

  • By default PayPal creates a fake personal and business account at https://developer.paypal.com/developer/accounts.

    • The personal account is the fake buyer
    • the business account is the your fake merchant account receiving the fake money

  • The password can found by clicking the ... next to the user account, View/edit account , System Generated Password: .

• Login with your fake PayPal user at https://www.sandbox.paypal.com/