The latest release of Commerce PayPal integrates Fastlane by PayPal, a payment gateway and checkout flow specifically designed to optimize the checkout experience. It streamlines the guest checkout experience, but for customers who opt in, Fastlane creates a unified profile that can accelerate checkout across participating sites.

We expect this integration to be particularly valuable for merchants transitioning away from PayPal's legacy solutions. It’s also a great opportunity to adopt a more modern checkout experience as popularized by other platforms and mobile wallets.

What makes Fastlane different

Fastlane allows users to complete their purchases in just a few clicks, potentially reducing cart abandonment rates.

• For first-time customers: Fastlane provides a streamlined guest checkout where customers can optionally save their payment method and shipping information by providing a mobile number. This creates a Fastlane profile that's shared across participating merchants.
• For returning customers: When a customer with a Fastlane profile shops at any participating merchant, they simply enter their email address. If a profile is found, they receive a one-time code via SMS to authenticate, and their saved payment and shipping details are instantly retrieved.

One-page checkout for Drupal Commerce

As part of our Fastlane integration, we implemented single-page checkout functionality. This feature actually advances a goal we've had for Drupal Commerce for a long time. Most modern e-commerce platforms now use single-page checkout to help reduce cart abandonment, and we plan to extend this approach to other payment gateways.

The perfect migration opportunity for legacy PayPal users

This release creates an upgrade path for merchants currently using PayPal's deprecated payment solutions. Payflow and Payflow Pro are legacy solutions that PayPal no longer actively develops, and they're encouraging migration to Fastlane.

While Payflow's embedded iframe interface has remained functionally unchanged for years, Fastlane offers a modern, responsive design that can be customized to match your site's branding (within PayPal's compliance requirements). The merchant setup process is comparable to existing PayPal integrations, primarily requiring API credentials and webhook configuration.

Some configuration notes

Our Fastlane implementation has a few specific restrictions and requirements.

• US merchants only: Currently, Fastlane is only available to US-based merchants, though PayPal has indicated international expansion is planned
• Single gateway limitation: The Fastlane checkout flow requires that only the Fastlane payment gateway be enabled for customer-facing payments (unless you're using multiple order types)
• Specialized checkout flow: You must use the automatically created "Fastlane by PayPal" checkout flow, which positions the contact information pane first and the payment information pane last
• Geographic detection: International customers will see a standard credit card form rather than the full Fastlane experience, based on IP-based customer detection

The documentation provides complete setup instructions, including the specific checkout flow configuration requirements and optional styling customization.

Looking ahead

Our roadmap includes vaulted payment support while PayPal continues to open up features for international markets. Both will increase Fastlane's value proposition for Drupal Commerce merchants. More importantly, PayPal’s commitment to evolving the guest checkout experience signals a broader industry shift away from forcing account creation.

For the Drupal Commerce ecosystem, this integration demonstrates our ability to adapt to payment innovation while maintaining the composability that makes our platform so powerful.

Give the new release a try and let us know what you think!