Accept PayPal payment using only credit card with Omnipay (PHP)

Question

I integrated OmniPay in my project few days ago, and I wondered if there is any option coming with it to actually enable credit card payments.

https://github.com/thephpleague/omnipay

I want to understand how to enable the PayPal credit card payments (which do not require an paypal account) using it.

What PayPal API settings should I enable? How can I code this? Is there any option to do this using PayPal & PHP at all?

I tried to document myself on this and I couldn't find any answer to this question. Neither on the https://github.com/thephpleague/omnipay nor on Stack.

Answer 1

The setting mentioned in comments, 'PayPal Account Optional' exists so you have the ability to only accept payments from people with an account (when set to 'No').

If set to 'Yes', payments without an account can be possible. But whether the option will be offered to a particular payer in a particular PayPal checkout attempt depends on very many factors, which you do not control.

The only way to have some guarantee of a guest method being offered is to show a credit card form on your own site, before the buyer reaches a PayPal.com page, using the black 'Debit or Credit Card' button that is part of the JS SDK. You can see an example demo here: https://developer.paypal.com/demo/checkout/#/pattern/server

That JS code used for payer approval can be paired with any backend to create and capture the order via API -- including Omnipay, which essentially acts as a proxy for the PayPal API. This JS replaces any redirect over to PayPal which you might be familiar with from oler legacy integrations; the JS SDK is a more modern way to get the payer's approval, via a small in-context window or open a credit card form iframe instead which is a better UX than redirecting away anyway.