Connect your app to PayPal
Connect an existing PayPal account to your app to handle checkout payments, order captures, and refunds. You can test safely using PayPal sandbox credentials before switching to live payments.
Anyone who wants to accept payments, collect deposits, or handle refunds through their own PayPal account.
Do this, in order
- 1
Go to the PayPal Developer Dashboard under Apps & Credentials, select Sandbox or Live, open or create a REST app, and copy the Client ID and Secret.
Lovable needs these credentials to talk to your PayPal account securely.
- 2
In Lovable, navigate to Connectors, select PayPal, and click Connect.
This opens the configuration form where you register the connection for your workspace.
- 3
Enter a connection name, select the matching environment (Sandbox or Live), and paste your Client ID and Secret.
The environment you pick must match where you generated the keys, or PayPal will reject them.
- 4
Set your sharing preferences under Sharing and click Connect at the bottom.
This verifies your credentials directly with PayPal and saves the connection.
- 5
In your Lovable project chat, ask Lovable to link your PayPal connection and build your checkout flow.
Projects must be linked to your connection before your app can create orders and capture payments.
Paste this into your project
Use PayPal and build a checkout so customers can pay for their cart with PayPal, and capture the order after payment is approved.
Words decoded
- Sandbox
- A fake PayPal environment where you can test payments with mock accounts without spending real money.
- REST app
- A setup inside your PayPal developer portal that generates the unique keys your app uses to talk to PayPal.
- Capture
- The final step that actually pulls the money from the buyer's account after they approve the checkout.
- Transaction Search
- An optional setting inside your PayPal developer app that must be turned on if you want your app to display past transaction history.
Where people get stuck
- Pasting sandbox credentials while selecting the Live environment (or vice versa) will cause validation to fail.
- Accidentally copying extra spaces at the beginning or end of your Secret will cause Lovable to reject the credential.
- Assuming recent transaction history works immediately; you must enable Transaction Search in PayPal, which can take up to 3 hours to update.
- Confusing this connector with Lovable's built-in Payments feature, which relies on Stripe or Paddle instead of your personal PayPal setup.
The short version, steps, decoder and prompt on this page are written automatically from Lovable's own documentation and can lag or misread it. The official page is always the authority.