Connect PayPal

Connecting PayPal brings every payment on your PayPal account into Klarvyn — including PayPal sales your shop or cart takes through its own PayPal integration. Klarvyn reads them with PayPal’s Transaction Search, using the credentials of a PayPal app you create in a couple of minutes.

1. Log in to developer.paypal.com with your PayPal Business account and switch to Live (top of the page).

2. Open Apps & Credentials and create an app — or open the Default Application.

3. In the app’s features, tick Transaction Search and save.

4. Copy the app’s Client ID and Secret.

5. In Klarvyn, go to Settings → Integrations, open the PayPal card, paste both and click Connect. Klarvyn checks that Transaction Search is enabled before it saves anything.

Klarvyn then imports the last 90 days and checks for new transactions every 30 minutes. PayPal makes a transaction available up to 3 hours after it happens, so new sales show up with that delay.

What flows in

• Payments you receive become purchases, with the items PayPal knows about and PayPal’s fee.
• Subscription payments start and renew subscriptions in the Subscriptions view.
• Refunds and chargebacks record negative revenue against the original sale.
• Payments you send, withdrawals and currency conversions are ignored.
• Imported history is recorded without sending conversions to your ad platforms — only new sales do that.

How attribution works

PayPal knows who paid, but not which visit they came from. Klarvyn matches each payment, in order, by:

1. A visitor id passed in PayPal’s custom / custom_id field. On PayPal payment buttons the Klarvyn tracking script fills this in automatically.
2. The return from PayPal. Turn on Auto Return in your PayPal account settings so buyers come back to a page on your site that runs the tracking script — Klarvyn picks up the transaction id PayPal adds to that page.
3. The buyer’s email, against contacts Klarvyn already knows.

Good to know

• Already selling through Shopify, WooCommerce or ThriveCart? Those integrations already send their PayPal sales to Klarvyn. Klarvyn skips a PayPal sale when another integration recorded a purchase by the same buyer, for the same amount, around the same time — so nothing is counted twice. You can switch this off on the PayPal card.
• “Transaction Search is not enabled” when connecting: check that you ticked it on the Live app whose Client ID you pasted. If you only just ticked it on an existing app, PayPal keeps handing out an access token from before the change for up to 9 hours. The fastest fix is to create a new Live app with Transaction Search ticked before you save it, and connect with that app’s Client ID and Secret. If the app is used by Klarvyn alone, you can instead click Reset token and connect on the PayPal card: Klarvyn ends the old token so PayPal issues a fresh one right away (anything else using the same app is signed out until it fetches a new token).
• Pending payments (for example eChecks) are recorded once PayPal completes them.
• Disconnect stops the import and deletes the stored Secret. Recorded data is kept.