The honest answer
Straight answer first, because you are here for it: Bookafy collects payments and deposits at the point of booking through Stripe and Authorize.net. PayPal is not one of the checkout processors at booking. If PayPal is a hard requirement, read on — there are two honest options and one of them may well be a reason to pick a different tool, which we would rather say than waste your afternoon.
Most people asking for PayPal want two things: cards, and a wallet the customer already trusts. Stripe covers the first completely and covers the second with Apple Pay, Google Pay and Link. For a booking flow — where the customer is already on your page, mid-decision — a card field converts fine.
The rest of what Bookafy does with Stripe is the part that matters anyway:
Book through Bookafy, then send a PayPal invoice or a PayPal.me link afterwards. This is a real workflow and plenty of people run it, but be clear-eyed: you lose the deposit-at-booking behaviour, which is usually the whole reason people want payments in a booking tool in the first place. Someone who has not paid is someone who has not committed.
You can automate the admin around it. Bookafy is a published Zapier app — triggers are New Appointment, New Customer, New Appointment Type, New User, and actions are Create Appointment, Create Customer. So a Zap can fire a PayPal invoice, or push the booking into your accounting tool, when someone books. Two caveats: Zapier polls Bookafy (every 15 minutes on the free plan, so it is not instant), and there is no cancellation trigger — use Bookafy’s webhooks and open API if either matters.
If you genuinely must have PayPal as the checkout at the moment of booking — some markets and some customer bases really do — then this is a fair reason to look elsewhere, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. Booking tools that take PayPal natively exist.
What we would ask you to weigh against it: with Bookafy you get payments through your own Stripe at 0% platform commission, SMS and email reminders included rather than metered, two-way calendar sync with Google, Outlook, Exchange and iCloud, automatic Zoom/Teams/Webex links, skill-based routing and round robin, and 32 languages. If PayPal is a preference rather than a requirement, that trade usually goes the other way.
No. Payments and deposits at booking go through Stripe or Authorize.net.
Yes — invoice through PayPal after the booking, and automate the invoice with a Zap. You just will not have the money in hand before the slot is held.
No. Funds go straight to your own Stripe or Authorize.net account.
No-shows drop. A customer who has paid something turns up; a customer who has clicked a free link often does not.
Bookafy also connects to 3,000+ apps through Zapier and Make, and offers an open API and webhooks for anything custom.
If you’re weighing up appointment scheduling software, these go deeper:
