Don’t have a PayPal account?
No problem, continue checkout.

But it’s very discreetly placed, since they’d rather have you sign up for an account.

However, it is possible to get PayPal to display credit card and PayPal payment options side by side as shown below. A lot of PayPal developers probably don’t know how to do this because the the required code tweak is also kind of buried in the developer documentation. I got one of the instructors at a certification seminar to show it to me.

I made a screen shot of it partly because it’s hard to demo for people. Because I already have a PayPal account, the website detects my member cookie and shows the PayPal login screen rather than giving me the credit card option, regardless of the aforementioned code tweak. I had to fire up a different browser to get it to show up this way.

PayPal with Credit Card Option

There’s still a button at the bottom prompting you to “Save your information with PayPal (create an account), but in this mode it’s not compulsory.

For developers, the code tweak is this:

SOLUTIONTYPE=Sole&LANDING=Billing

Add these variables to the name-value pair string passed to the PayPal API with your checkout request. The “Sole” type says that a PayPal account is optional, and the “Billing” landing page displays credit card billing options.