PayPal’s Public Postman Collection Is for Developers of All Kinds

This is a guest post written by Travell Williams, software engineer at PayPal.

At PayPal, we’ve been working hard behind the scenes to make our application programming interfaces (APIs) more accessible to developers of all backgrounds and experience levels. Our community provided us with feedback that it can be difficult for developers to get started with our API and that they encounter friction in their experience.

Based on these insights, PayPal Senior Product Manager for API Experiences Deepa Goyal collaborated with PayPal Software Engineers Swapnil Sapar and Ankur Tiwari (and other PayPal engineers) to build a solution. While APIs are considered to be code-intensive, our team understands that developers who build with PayPal are not all coders. Developers are not all the same.

A PayPal developer can range from anyone who uses our product to add payment functionality to their website using no-code/low-code platforms (such as Shopify), to coders who build web experiences from the ground up. So, creating a public Postman Collection was a no-brainer for our team. Postman allows us to meet the varied skillsets of our diverse developer community while also providing an interface to interact with our API seamlessly.

Related: Postman Collection best practices

Hundreds of developers, as well as people from other functions within PayPal, came together as part of a usability exercise to explore this collection before it was publicly available. Our team was able to receive perspectives from code-intensive developers and address the needs of low-code and no-code developers who are also a key audience for us at PayPal. The feedback from this exercise helped us improve the collection tremendously.

Now, we’re excited to release the PayPal Public APIs collection to the public and hope that it’ll help developers integrate PayPal payments seamlessly. To support that mission, this blog post will now walk through the steps for how to get started with our collection.

How to explore PayPal collections in Postman

If you don’t already have a Postman account, you’ll need to create an account here. (Note: You are not required to have a PayPal or Postman account to browse the collection.)

Let’s get started

1. Fork the Collection

1. Head over to postman.com/paypal
2. Choose the collection named PayPal Public APIs <DATE>:

3. Once you are redirected to the collection within the PayPal Public API Workspace click Run in Postman under the Documentation tab:

4. Click Fork Collection. This should redirect you to a screen where you are able to name your fork and associate it with your desired workspace. Once you’ve decided that information, click Fork Collection:

Great job! Now the PayPal Public APIs <DATE> collection should be available in your workspace:

5. Make your first API call

1. Within your workspace, make sure PayPal Public APIs <Date> is selected.
2. Navigate through the collection hierarchy, clicking on PayPal Public APIs <DATE>, then Order, and then Create Order:

The HTTP method should be set as POST to the {{base_url}}/v2/checkout/orders URL:

3. Click Send:

You should receive a 201 response with transaction details:

That’s it! Great job on making a transaction API request to PayPal using Postman. Feel free to try out other requests in the collection. If you have any questions or feedback, be sure to reach out to us by tweeting to @paypaldev on Twitter or via our developer support page. And check out PayPal’s video tutorial on the topic below.