PayPal Sandbox

While working in a project in eSpace contains e-commerce handling, I wanted to test my code against PayPal payment gateway. I found that PayPal have a test server called PayPal Sandbox. Using this test server you can simulate all the transactions you want to do over the actual PayPal account.

PayPal Sandbox contains the following features:

1. Simulate actual transactions (authorize, purchase, credit, etc).
2. You can create test accounts for sellers/buyers as many as you want.
3. Every created test account will have its own credit card (fake one). You can use it to test you transactions and its balance will reflect your applied transactions.
4. You can use any of your seller/buyer test accounts to enter the paypal test site and trace its transactions, create reports, etc.
5. You can access this test sandbox from your code through PayPal APIs.

But, it contains some drawbacks:

1. The given test credit cards does not contain verification code (CVV code), but you can use "000" instead of it in your tests.
2. When you enable the API in your Paypal account, you will get API user name, API password and either a signature string or certificate file. Using Sandbox you will get only the signature string.