paypal ipn takes couple of minutes - paypal

I'm using IPN from paypal to get information about transactions based on reference transaction id. The first time we try to create a paypal account for the customer after redirected from paypal dialog, it looks like ipn tooks couple of minutes to gave us the results we needed. Also for recurring payments based on reference transaction id, it tooks a couple of minutes up to hours until the payment gets confirmed by ipn.
We use angular in frontend and the verification process is completed. But the ipn notification in our django backend will be received after a few minutes which is way too long.
For the ux it is very bad and other websites also handle this in a few seconds. Is it only because of sandbox?
greetings and thanks for help

IPN is a very old, asynchronous technology. There is no latency guarantee, and no reason to be relying on IPN notifications with current PayPal Checkout integrations.
Instead, follow the PayPal Checkout integration guide and make 2 routes on your server, one for 'Create Order' and one for 'Capture Order' (see the optional step 5 in 'Add and modify the code'). Both of these routes should return only JSON data (no HTML or text). Inside the 2nd route, when the capture API is successful you should store its resulting payment details in your database (particularly purchase_units[0].payments.captures[0].id, which is the PayPal transaction ID) and perform any necessary business logic (such as sending confirmation emails or reserving product) immediately before forwarding your return JSON to the frontend caller.
Pair those 2 routes with the frontend approval flow: https://developer.paypal.com/demo/checkout/#/pattern/server

Related

Upgrading PayPal payment to Orders API, the testing account didn't receive any money after finish the payment

I'm trying to implement the new PayPal Orders API, here is what I did:
Create a developer account, add an app name and then I have Client Id and Secret.
Use OrderCreateRequest to create an Order
Get approvel_url from the resposne->result->links
Redirect to this approvel_url and finish the payment
Paypal will redirect back to my website.
But I never got any thing from the PayPal testing account,Please, what did I miss?
Edit:
On No.4, when redirects to the PayPal page, somehow it only shows 'Continue' button on the page, not the 'make payment' button.
You are missing:
Display an order review page to the payer.
Capture the order with an API call, which (if successful) will return the transaction ID in the purchase_units[0].payments.captures[0] object.
On success, display a thank you/confirmation page.
Without the final capture API call, there is no PayPal transaction.
You are also still using an old integration method based on redirects, which is for old websites. Current PayPal Checkout integrations use no redirects. At all.
Instead of redirecting, make two routes on your server, one for 'Create Order' and one for 'Capture Order', documented here. These routes should return only JSON data (no HTML or text). When a capture response is successful, store its resulting payment details in your database (particularly purchase_units[0].payments.captures[0].id, the PayPal transaction ID) and perform any necessary business logic (such as sending confirmation emails or reserving product) right before sending your return JSON.
Pair those two routes with the following approval flow: https://developer.paypal.com/demo/checkout/#/pattern/server

Paypal IPN getting delayed by hours

I'm using paypal adaptive payments to make transaction via paypal. Although few of transactions are taking more than 6 hours too receive IPN.
I've gone through forum posts and their documentation, I came through - https://developer.paypal.com/webapps/developer/docs/classic/products/instant-payment-notification/
"Because IPN is not a real-time service, your checkout flow should not wait for the IPN message before it is allowed to complete. If the checkout flow is dependent on receiving an IPN message, processing can be delayed by system load or other reasons. You should configure your checkout flow to handle a possible delay."
The callback is taking more than 6 hours is way too much. any suggestions ?
I've built several custom carts. On average, I see the PayPal IPN come back within 2 minutes at the longest, and usually recurring payments take longer than single payments because they send two IPN messages, not just one, on the initial setup. I usually take the 'custom' property and put a unique identifier that I have permanently cookied. So, even though I may see an initial IPN come in on a recurring payment, I wait for the one that says that txn_type is subscr_payment and also that payment_status is Completed. You can't really trust a subscription payment as being paid unless you see that second message. And if it's a single payment, then I look for txn_type to be web_accept and payment_status to Completed.
The way I handle things is to redirect the customer to PayPal to purchase using the form button technique. The customer pays and then gets redirected (thanks to the form hidden vars I created initially) back to my own custom cart URL that I specify. I call that URL the payment-confirmation script. I display a message with a progress bar to please wait while their payment is being confirmed with PayPal. I hold them there 10 seconds and then redirect to the receipt. It is on the receipt where I check the database to see if my IPN script has already processed this order. If not, then I redirect them back to the payment-confirmation script again for another 10 second progress bar delay. My receipt uses a session cookie to ensure I never send them into a loop more than one time to the payment-confirmation script. So, the customer waits another 10 seconds and then comes back to the receipt page, where I test again, reading my permanent cookie on the 'custom' property that I saved, versus the 'custom' property that comes in from the IPN that I use as the order key in the database. Usually within the first or second 10 second delay, the IPN has come in and I can proceed. However, if the IPN has still not come in, then I redirect to a friendly error message saying that their payment cannot be confirmed and to call our call center to remedy the issue. Our call center techs then see the delay problem in PayPal, back the other transaction out, and sell to the customer over the phone manually, instead.

IPN delay and SAAS application

I have a SAAS web application that works through a subscription fee. If the subscription is valid everything works fine, otherwise the app goes in read-only mode until the customer renew the subscription. I've developed the payment flow with the PayPal API.
The problem is that PayPal Documentation says this:
"Although PayPal usually processes IPN messages immediately, IPN is not synchronized with actions on your website. Internet connectivity is not always 100% reliable and IPN messages can be lost or delayed. The IPN service automatically resends messages until the listener acknowledges them. The service resends messages for up to 4 days.
Because IPN is not a real-time service, your checkout flow should not wait for the IPN message before it is allowed to complete. If the checkout flow is dependent on receiving an IPN message, processing can be delayed by system load or other reasons. You should configure your checkout flow to handle a possible delay."
Unfortunately this is exactly my case: when customers renew the subscription I need to immediately activate the app so I placed all the logic right in the "notify callback" where I have to create the order, send a confirmation email, update some session variables... but I if there's a delay from PayPal IPN this is a problem!
In these days I did some test in Sandbox mode and in several cases I got an answer from IPN even 4 hours after the successful payment! This is unacceptable for my app!
Finally the question: what's the best solution for my case? It makes sense to move the application activation from "notify callback" to "success callback"? There may be problems?
Thanks
Don't use IPN for this; it's a poor fit & not designed to be inserted into synchronous user experience flows. It works fine as a way to initiate offline fulfillment, but can delay your customers if they are actively waiting for access.
You don't specify which PayPal product you are using, but each product should provide a way to immediately give you feedback that the payment has been completed. For example with Express Checkout or any API-based payment you can take action (activate/re-activate a subscription) when you receive the successful API response (the DoEC API in the case of Express Checkout).
With web-only/non-API products you can take action when the customer redirects to your return_url, using PDT to securely get information about the transaction if you need that (it can include an IPN-style key that you post back to PayPal to verify, exactly as you do with an IPN).
If you are concerned about the edge cases of someone closing their browser before it can redirect to you, or some other sort of dropped connection or programming error, you can also check & activate/fulfill upon receipt of an IPN to catch any fallout. So all customers that complete a normal payment flow are activated immediately; if they do something wonky (or your code breaks, or whatever) then the activation still happens, albeit potentially delayed by a few seconds or minutes.

Paypal REST API and Chargebacks/Cancellations

I have been working paypal integration to an existing system of ours and successfully done tests on sandbox by using rest api and express checkouts.
Although documentation is detailed, I couldnt see anything about chargeback (i.e reverse transactions) and cancellations on rest api documentation page http://developer.paypal.com/docs/api/
So in case a user buys something successfully and the payment status becomes "completed", then there is a reverse transaction like chargeback, paypal will send a request to the return and cancel urls which are predefined while creating the related payment, or the client application has to check the payment statuses manually by rest calls? Or are there any other configs that I need to send while triggering the very first payment request?
You'll need to setup Instant Payment Notification (IPN) to handle that sort of thing.
IPN will automatically POST data about all transactions that hit your PayPal account to a URL you specify. This URL (a script) can receive the data and update your database, generate email notifications, or anything else you might want to automate based on the transactions.
You can handle all sorts of things with IPN. For chargebacks specifically, you would receive an IPN with the following params...
txn_type=new_case
case_type=chargeback
Of course, you'll get a bunch more parameters, too, but those would be how you can pick out the chargebacks and processing them accordingly.

Execute tasks after PayPal chained payment is successful

Current Status
I'm quite new to PayPal and I'm currently integrating chained adaptive payments on our website. Already successfully called the PAY API call via the .NET SDK. Money (sandbox enviroment) will be correctly transferred to each participants of this payment (sender, primary and secondary receiver).
Requirement
My goal is to execute vital tasks after the payment is successful (update DB, send mail, ...) or has been cancelled (clean up stuff, ...).
Possible solutions
1)
First approach was to create the payment with actionType set to CREATE, redirect the user to paypal.com (wait for approval), redirect user back to website and execute the payment and then perform the vital tasks. But it seems not to work, the payment will be paid and is COMPLETED before the second redirect.
2)
Another possible solution would be to get the preapproval from the user, redirect back to the website and execute the payment. Haven't tried this solution yet, don't think that this is best practice.
3)
Call PAY with actionType set to "PAY" and wait for IPN. Haven't tried that either, because it is quite difficult to test it locally (even though I've already found this question: Paypal Sandbox Test Tool IPN Simulator in Localhost).
Question(s)
Which solution is best practice? I guess the recommended solution would be to wait for an IPN?
If I'am using IPN how long is the average response time after a payment has been completed? Seconds, minutes, hours? I know it depends on the load of the PayPal webservers and that there are 15 retries over 4 days, but what are some real world numbers?
Can I store additional information (e.g. UserId) about the sender in a payment (besides the memo field) which I then get back in an IPN?
Here is how I do it.
When I'm going to initiate PayPal payment (before I send a request to obtain TOKEN), I create new transaction in my database and set it's status to PENDING. In transaction table I also have userID column, which is foreign key to user table. This way I connect transaction with user.
When transaction is created in my table, I use transactionId value, and save it to PHP $_SESSION variable.
Please note that if you want to support recurring payments, you can provide transactionId to PayPal. This you can do by setting:
"PAYMENTREQUEST_0_INVNUM"=>$transaction->id.
This value will be sent when PayPal sends you IPN request after recurring payment happens.
Go back now to the story
User is redirected to PayPal, and when user fills PayPal username and password, and when user confirms payment details, user will be redirected back to your website and you have to call DoExpressCheckoutPayment to make payment itself.
If the result of DoExpressCheckoutPayment API call is success, that means that transaction was successful and you have money. At this point, you can send email, notifications, or any other important action.
$transactionResponse=$paypal->request("DoExpressCheckoutPayment",$requestParams);//Execute transaction
if(is_array($transactionResponse) && $transactionResponse["ACK"]=="Success")//Payment was successfull
{
//Send email
//Notify user
//Do other important changes in database, for example mark this transaction as successful
Transactions()::model()->updateByPk($_SESSION['transactionId'],array('status'=>'SUCCESS');
}
IMPORTANT NOTE FOR RECURRING PAYMENTS: PayPal can/will send you several IPN requests for the same recurring transaction which means that you have to add logic which will chekc weather specific IPN request is already processed or not. Usually I do it in a way to check weather status of my transaction with transactionId is 'PENDING' or 'SUCCESSFUL'.