Paypal with active webhooks. We use a subscription plan.
When a customer
subscribes to the subscription plan PayPal's webhook sends us a BILLING.SUBSCRIPTION.CREATED.
We do not get a BILLING.SUBSCRIPTION.ACTIVATED. Can I expect it being activated when it is
created or do I need to double check that?
(Side note, when trying to send an api request to activate it, an error message informs me that the subscription plan is not “suspended”. So that looks like it is already activated. Logging into PayPal also confirms it is activated.)
The documentation on it is a little vague.
Created means the user clicked the button to subscribe. It does not mean they entered any payment details, or finished subscribing.
If you are not receiving a BILLING.SUBSCRIPTION.ACTIVATED event but the subscription is active, perhaps you did not subscribe to that event?
In any case, the most useful event to listen for is PAYMENT.SALE.COMPLETED. This will occur for the first payment as well as every future payment on the schedule. You can build all your business logic with only PAYMENT.SALE.COMPLETED , using every receipt of this event to mark how long the subscription is valid for in your system (e.g. 1 month from receipt)
Related
I have a subscription based web site where I would like to get statistics about all the current active subscribers and how many cycles they have made. This would have been easy task if the PayPal API had an endpoint for fetching all subscriptions but this is missing from their API. So I'm tracking this in our DB. I'm successfully recording the new subscriptions and the cancellations. But I'm not sure what event I should expect from PayPal to be triggered when a subscription renews.
In PayPal's documentation I have found only few events related to the subscriptions, and none of those seems to serve my needs. There are also an event called BILLING.SUBSCRIPTION.RE-ACTIVATED but it comes from "Billing plans and agreements" which is deprecated.
In SO I have found this post which advises to check for the PAYMENT.SALE.COMPLETED, but this is not perfect as I will get all sort of payments that hit this PayPal account (it is used not only for subscriptions but also for one-time payments).
It's PAYMENT.SALE.COMPLETED
For one time payments, a /v2/checkout/orders integration shouldn't trigger that same event, only the deprecated /v1/payments does AFAIK.
You can tell whether it's a subscription payment by the payload, subscription IDs begin with I-
I'm integrating PayPal payment gateway into my application. I'm using the PayPal REST API's. I'm able to authorize the request and webhook. Also, API and webhooks are working fine for me. The only thing about I'm little confused that which event and sequences of events will be if subscription payment failed?
For subscriptions, the only event you need to act on is PAYMENT.SALE.COMPLETED. When you receive this event, update the profile's valid date through the next cycle (e.g. 1 month in the future). If you don't receive a new PAYMENT.SALE.COMPLETED in time, the subscription has lapsed.
When creating the subscription you can set a custom_id which is useful for reconcilliation.
I haven't tested in live, but currently I have a webhook subscribed to the following events
Billing subscription cancelled
Billing subscription created
Billing subscription re-activated
Billing subscription suspended
Billing subscription updated
I'm receiving Webhook events for CREATED but nothing is being sent when a user cancels the subscription from their PayPal dashboard.
Is this expected behavior? is there another event I should be subscribe to to capture that user action?
Is there a debug id that you can share so we can trouble shoot?
Thanks,
Usha
From Paypal support (I still don't understand why the BILLING.SUBSCRIPTION.CANCELLED doesn't fire when a user cancels from their dashboard, similar issue here: BILLING.SUBSCRIPTION.CANCELLED does not fire upon user action?)
"But surely users subscribing via the button is the most common method of subscribing (how else would they subscribe?). The IPN route seems like a completely non-developer-friendly one (seeing as there isn't even simulator events for it)"
If you integrate a solution which is not based on our REST API's and want to receive HTTP notifications, you need to use instant payment notification (IPN). The IPN simulator may not provide a method of simulating the events, but you can create subscriptions in our sandbox environment and setup a sandbox business account with IPN and test cancelling the subscriptions, which will generate an IPN for the cancellation. We have a sandbox testing guide available here if you're not familiar with that environment and want to get started.
"So why would webhooks ONLY fire for API-based subscriptions (and why would a business website subscribe users using the API rather than the simple button)? What is the logic behind this?"
It depends on the integration and needs of the individual business. Some businesses only use our REST-based API solutions for their complete integration, from checkout payments to subscriptions and logically, this makes sense to them to only have to use one set of API's for their complete integration. Other business only want / need a more simple solution such as using buttons and as these are legacy solutions which are not REST-based, they use our legacy HTTP notification service which is instant payment notification (IPN).
We have a production game that uses PayPal as one of the methods of payment. In some cases, we're never receiving webhook notifications.
Here's the sequence that's occurring. Sometimes we get the webhook from this sequence, and other times we don't. On the server, we're using the Java API. All of this is the behavior with the production (NOT SANDBOX) PayPal servers.
After the user selects a product, it calls our server, which creates the Payment object via Payment.create(). At that point the state is 'created' and we redirect the user to the approval_url returned in the links.
The user approves the payment and is sent back to our server. We fetch the payment via Payment.get(), which is successful and has a state of 'created'.
We execute the payment using a PaymentExecution. This returns the payment with an updated state of "approved".
We then wait for a WebHook to inform us that the payment was completed. On occasion, this webhook is never sent, leaving the purchase incomplete. Checking the PayPal console, no webhook event exists for the payment, even though the payment is showing up as completed.
The questions here are:
Is this the correct sequence? Or is something missing?
Shouldn't the payment be "approved" when the user is returned from PayPal rather than still "created"?
Shouldn't the payment be either "completed" or "in_progress" after a successful execute?
What is the correct way to handle the case where the webhook never arrives? Keep polling the payment until the state updates?
I do not see any problem with your sequence. You can also refer to the steps here as an example - https://developer.paypal.com/docs/integration/web/accept-paypal-payment/
Regarding Webhooks, you mentioned sometimes you get Webhooks and only some times you do not. Can you please provide a correlation or debug id for the calls where you don't see any Webhook? We will trouble shoot and get back?
Is it possible to register some PayPal web hook that will get executed whenever some transaction with concrete seller changes it's status, becomes charged back etc.? I couldn't find anything about this in docs. It would be much efficient than periodically checking status of every transaction.
Thanks!
Check out Instant Payment Notification (IPN).
Instant Payment Notification (IPN) is a message service that notifies
you of events related to PayPal transactions. You can use this service
to automate back-office and administrative functions, including
fulfilling orders, tracking customers, and providing status and other
information related to transactions.
Note: you can register ONE place to be notified ... and it will need to parse out which notifications should be handled by what code.