To accept payments via PayPal, you need a PayPal business account. If you already have a PayPal personal account, you really want to keep that separate from your developer account. Here’s how to create a PayPal business account, at least as of this writing:
Go to the PayPal website.[25] Click “Sign up” and then “Open a business account.” You are directed to the business home page, then click “Get Started.”
Now it gets a little confusing. You have three options: “PayPal Payments Standard,” “PayPal Payments Pro,” and “Already accepting credit cards?” That third option, which is usually called “PayPal Express Checkout” and which for some reason PayPal isn’t identifying as such on the site, is the one we want. That’s the classic “Check out with PayPal button” experience you are probably familiar with.
To select the Express Checkout option, click “Learn More” following the “Already accepting credit cards?” option and then click “Get Express Checkout.” You are now asked to answer a couple of questions about your business and enter your business’s URL. Next you are asked for an email address. When you enter your email address you are taken to a “Sign up for a Business account” form with that email address filled in. (It seems we could have gotten to this form in fewer than four pages, but c’est la vie.)
The form asks us to enter a legal name and a legal business name (though the help text says, “If there isn’t [a business name] then please enter something that best represents what you are doing”). You need to enter a phone number and mailing address as well. Then you go to another form for some additional questions about the business. The next page asks for the last four digits of your Social Security number and your date of birth. (Non-U.S. residents, I assume you have something different here.)
Finally, you are able to submit the form and create the account.
The resulting page says, “Welcome to your PayPal Business Account.” You’ll need to perform additional setup activities to actually take payments, but at this point we are ready to create a test account for our theater application.
To test PayPal in development mode, we need to create what PayPal calls “sandbox accounts,” and as far as I can tell, how to do so is completely opaque from the business account page. But once you are logged into your business account, point your web browser to the Sandbox Test Accounts page.[26] You should see two automatically created sandbox accounts, as shown in the figure.
For the purposes of this book, we are using two accounts to test our system. One account is our fake business account (moneybook-facilitator@noelrappin.com), and the other account is our fake buyer (moneybook-buyer@noelrappin.com). These accounts are based on the email you used to set up the business account, and you’ll start with one business account and one personal account. You can create more from this page if you want.
With our account set up, we can use it as a source of the API keys we need, as well as use it to verify and test our transactions.