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Payments
Reign + PayPal. Payments integration.
PayPal is the second-most-used payment processor, especially for international + non-card buyers.
Reign + PayPal as a secondary checkout option captures international buyers who do not use cards. Works alongside Stripe via WooCommerce or MemberPress.
How it works with Reign.
Reign ships no plugin-specific styles for PayPal, and does not need to: it is a gateway, so it has no frontend of its own beyond the button and the redirect. Nothing here fights the theme, so there is no compatibility work to do and no override layer to maintain. What Reign does affect is the pages around it. What the buyer sees before and after is your commerce plugin's cart, checkout and receipt pages, and those are what the theme styles. Running PayPal through WooCommerce or EDD means the surrounding pages use Reign's dedicated stylesheets for those plugins.
When to use it.
Add PayPal when your audience expects it, which is most consumer markets and particularly outside the US. It is rarely the only gateway worth having, because the fees and the payout timing are less favourable than Stripe for most sellers, but the conversion gain from buyers who will not enter a card is real and easy to measure.
4 steps to ship.
1
Install PayPal Payments by PayPal (free, official) or PayPal for WooCommerce.
2
Enter your PayPal API credentials.
3
Add PayPal as a secondary checkout option alongside Stripe.
4
Test with a sandbox PayPal account.
What to check once it is live.
Complete one real purchase and refund it. PayPal redirects away from your site and back, so the return URL is the thing that breaks: confirm the buyer lands on your order-received page rather than a blank screen. Check the order appears in your commerce plugin, not only in PayPal.
PayPal integration questions.
Should I use PayPal instead of Stripe?
Use both. Stripe primary (cards), PayPal secondary (international + non-card buyers). Conversion lift from offering PayPal is typically 5-10%.
PayPal Adaptive for marketplace split payments?
PayPal Adaptive is deprecated. Use Stripe Connect or PayPal Commerce Platform instead.
Can I use PayPal alongside Stripe?
Yes, and most stores do. Each is a separate gateway in your commerce plugin and the buyer picks at checkout. There is no conflict, and no reason to choose one exclusively unless you want to keep the checkout as simple as possible.
Does PayPal work with subscriptions?
Through your membership or commerce plugin, yes, though the specifics differ by plugin and by PayPal product. Check what your plugin supports before promising members recurring billing on PayPal, because the handling of upgrades and cancellations varies more than it does with Stripe.
Does PayPal affect page speed?
It adds what any plugin adds, and the honest way to find out is to measure your own site rather than trust a general claim. PayPal's script loads on cart and checkout rather than everywhere, so the impact sits on the pages where people are already committed. On a community site the heavy pages are almost always the dynamic ones, profiles, feeds and directories, so that is where to look first if the site feels slow.
Pick a bundled kit.
The Reign theme is $99/year or $249 lifetime and it is the only required purchase. Kits bundle it with the add-ons that style a third-party stack.