SurveyMonkey

Accepting Payments with PayPal

Beta Feature: Accepting payments via PayPal is only available to some customers on certain paid plans.

Let your respondents make payments via PayPal right within your form or survey. You can either assign prices to a single question to charge different amounts per answer option, or charge a fixed price for your entire form.

PayPal is a third-party payment processor that lets you securely accept and manage payments online. You'll need to connect a PayPal Business or Personal account before you can add the payment option to your form to accept payments. Only the form owner can connect their PayPal account. You can't connect a PayPal account to surveys that are shared with you. 

Form creators can learn more about PayPal’s merchant fees associated with accepting payments. 

Payment pages display at the end of your form. This means people need to complete your form in order to see the payment page. For a quick payment experience, try to make a short and simple form.

Prices must be a whole number between $1-$10,000 in most accepted currencies.

To create a form that accepts payments with PayPal:

  1. Create a survey. From the Design Survey tab, select Options, and then select Payment
  2. Choose PayPal as the payment processor to collect payments.
  3. If it’s your first time adding the PayPal Payment option, click Connect to PayPal and follow the instructions to log in or sign up.
  4. Once connected into PayPal, select the Currency you wish to collect payments in.
  5. Under Payment amount, choose to assign the:
    • Same amount for everyone—all users are charged the same amount regardless of their responses.
      • Enter a Description for the payment and a Price
    • Payment linked to a question—people are charged based on the answer they select or enter in the payment question.
      • Select the Payment question you want to assign payment prices to.
      • Enter the Price per answer option.
      • Add prices to each answer option.
      • Click Save.
  6. A Payment page gets added to the end of your form.
  7. If you wish to update the language on the Payment page, you can click directly on Submit your payment to update the text displayed to respondents.


PayPal is free and easy to set up, but if you have any issues connecting your accounts you can reach out to the PayPal support team.

You can click Manage account from the side panel to open My Account to manage PayPal from Linked Accounts.

You can preview the form to see prices appear on the question and the PayPal checkout display, however it isn’t possible to test making a payment and no transactions can be processed while previewing.

Changes to prices or currency will go into effect immediately for new responses. Editing a question with payment associated may be limited if this form already has responses.

TIP! If you have a limited amount of tickets or items that you want to accept payment for, you can add a quota to your form. Once the quota has been met, the form closes and respondents won't see the payment page.

You can stop accepting payments from your form at any time by closing your form.

If you delete the form question associated with payments after you’ve collected responses, you will also delete any transaction records from previous payments in the Analyze Results section. You'll always be able to see your complete transaction record in your PayPal account.

If you disconnect your PayPal account in My Account, you won't be able to collect any additional payments from your forms or surveys.

Forms creators can only charge in the following currencies: AUD, CAD, CHF, EUR, GBP, HKD, JPY, NOK, NZD, SEK, SGD, and USD. People taking your survey have plenty of options to pay.

After you design your form, create a collector to send it out and start accepting payments. You can send a form with a payment page using any collector type, except for Audience, Mobile SDK, and Offline Mode.

After a respondent submits a payment, they won't be able to return to the form even when Response Editing is on.

When someone submits a payment through your form, PayPal collects all of the details from the payment page, which means SurveyMonkey never saves or stores any credit card numbers.

You can go to the Analyze Results section of your form to see the transactions made along with responses in your Question summary or Tabular view. You'll find them at the very bottom of your form results.

The Payment Summary shows:

  • PayPal’s Charge ID 
  • The amount paid
  • The date and time
  • The item description
  • The respondent's first and last name
  • The transaction status

This is only a snapshot of each payment taken at the time the form is completed. To view real-time purchase totals, make refunds, and transfer funds to your bank account, log in to PayPal.

When someone submits a payment through your form, they'll receive an email from PayPal confirming their transaction. Transactions appear on their credit or debit card statements with the name of your form.

SurveyMonkey's platform allows you to integrate with third-party payment processors. Some of these payment processors may require Strong Customer Authentication (SCA) under the EU Payment Services Directive (PSD2). People in Europe who submit payment through your form may need to provide additional authentication. It's not possible to disable this authentication when payment processors require it.

If someone runs into issues making payment, they can reach out to PayPal or the form owner for assistance.