As the shop admin, you will need the shipping address of the customer to ship physical products but know that you don’t have to do anything special. PayPal handles the shipping address collection and will email you with postage information after a payment so you can ship the product.
Triggering Shipping Address Collection for Digital Items
If you are selling physical products (with a shipping fee) then it will trigger a shipping address collection during the checkout process.
By default, WP eStore plugin doesn’t trigger the shipping address collection for digital products as it’s an unnecessary step that we can skip to speed up the checkout process. If you have a product that is not really a physical product but you still want to collect shipping/mailing address, do the following to trigger address collection during checkout.
Step 1) Edit the product in question and uncheck the “Downloadable” checkbox.
Step 2) Add a value of 0.001 in the “Item Shipping Cost” field. This will make it so it doesn’t charge a shipping amount but it will trigger hte address collection.
This is how it works:
- A customer clicks on the Pay Now/Checkout button and goes to PayPal to pay for the product or service.
- The customer fills in the credit card details or logs into his/her PayPal account and reviews the order.
- Now before hitting the “Pay Now” button the customer can use the default shipping address (taken from his/her PayPal account) or specify a different shipping address by clicking on “Change Shipping” that is shown below the default shipping address.
- After payment, PayPal will send you a payment confirmation email which will have this postal address so you can ship the item.
- The plugin will also capture the address in the “Cart Orders” menu inside your WordPress admin dashboard.
Shipping Address Collection When Paying from PayPal account
Shipping Address Collection When Paying using a Credit Card
Alternative Option
The other option is to drop a shipping address collection form similar to the one shown in the following screenshot on the “Thank You” page. This way when the customers get redirected to the “Thank You” page after paying on PayPal, they can enter their shipping address. The content of the form (the address in this case) is mailed to you when the customer hits the submit button.
It is really easy to add a form similar to the one shown above using a WordPress contact form plugin. I use the Contact Form 7 plugin which allows you to add a customized form on any page to collect info from visitors.
Note: We provide technical support for our premium plugins via our customer only support forum
@Damien, WP eStore will automatically set the *shipping address required* flag when your customers checkout a physical product. This will make it to where the customer will need to enter a shipping address when checking out via PayPal (credit card or PayPal account).
Post a link to the page where you have the purchase button for your physical product so I can see why it is not doing that for your site.
Have you configure shipping in this product/item?
Are you using PayPal’s profile based shipping?
Hi,
I have set up a buy now option on my website but when a buyer who doesn’t have a paypal account purchases a product using paypal it doesn’t capture their shipping address …. Paypal support have said this needs to be set up through the WP Estore….is this correct? as from above it states that Paypal will send the shipping address to the seller!
Clarification would be welcome, thanks
Yep the full payment details is available on the “Thank You” page. I would recommend using the Transaction ID to track the order (this way it will match nicely as it’s unique).
You can access the transaction ID like the following in PHP then use it however you want to:
$transaction_id = $_POST[‘txn_id’];
Is there anyway to pass a id to the thank you page for a hidden field, so you can easily match the submitted form up to the order?
Hi, Yes the information is secure both in PayPal and in the eStore as some of this data is saved in the eStore database.
That makes a lot of sense, didn’t realise it was such a simple process. As it’s PayPal I presume the security is up to scratch on the storage of the data?
Hi Crystal, The eStore gets all of this information from PayPal. The eStore does not require the customer to provide this information. You would need to look for this setting in PayPal and turn it off. I believe it is in the profile under shipping.
Hi there,
I’m selling downloadable items, so I don’t need or want the customers’ addresses. And some shoppers have noted that they don’t like giving out their address when they don’t have to.
When I make a button at PayPal, there’s a setting to not require the address, but is there a setting in eStore to do the same thing?
Thanks!