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Background

I need to be able to test payments made via public paypal.com using a "dummy" personal paypal.com account created via the PayPal Sandbox tools: https://developer.paypal.com/webapps/developer/applications/accounts - here I created a Business Merchant Account (where the payment will be sent to) and also a Personal account (which I want to use to make the payment on the usual paypal.com public site.

The Problem

The problem is that the email address and password that I set up the sandbox personal account do not work on the public paypal.com site as I would expect - paypal.com reports the standard login failure. It also seems that the email address is not recognised - when I click the forgot password link and enter the same email, it says email not found. Surprising given that this email was what I used to set up the personal paypal account via the sandbox.

The question, summing up

So What would I need to do to be able to use a PayPal-sandbox-created personal account to test payments made via the public paypal.com site?

My Research on this problem so far

I've looked around already for existing answers - on SO and via google...

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therobyouknow
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2 Answers2

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Found the solution :) Happy to be answering my own question: the working solution is to use www.sandbox.paypal.com in the form action when testing, instead of www.paypal.com

As per page 27 of:

https://cms.paypal.com/cms_content/GB/en_GB/files/developer/PP_Sandbox_UserGuide.pdf

It says:

IMPORTANT: To execute test transactions on Sandbox you need to complete a purchase as a test buyer with your buyer test account. Typically, you go through your website purchase flow as a buyer. You must ensure that you execute your test on www.sandbox.paypal.com instead of www.paypal.com

So, for example, the snippets of code for your paypal button would look something like:

<form action="https://www.sandbox.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr" method="post">

but still use just paypal.com for the action button (as the image is not available on www.sandbox.paypal.com):

<input type="image" src="http://www.paypal.com/en_US/i/btn/x-click-but01.gif" name="submit" alt="Make payments with PayPal - it's fast, free and secure!">

Don't forget to change the form action to use www.paypal.com when you go live!

Obviously the pre-requisites are to setup a dummy merchant and dummy buyer account - as I described in my question - this is still valid and my steps should work.

If it doesn't work - i.e. login fails for example, clear out your browser data entirely. I had this problem and cleared everything - cookies history etc. and it worked. See related question here: paypal sandbox not working

(as this answer works, I will be accepting it when I am allowed to do so).

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therobyouknow
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    This was the solution for my problem! – Kevin Vella Aug 09 '14 at 13:30
  • Aside from the fact that this doesn't work, why on earth wouldn't the button code be formatted correctly when created in the sandbox seller account? Is Paypal really that dumb? – matt Dec 06 '14 at 02:01
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Just clearing cookies worked for me. By the way there was 44 cookies

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