I am using a paypal subscription button, with server side listener for webhook event notifications still in sandbox mode.
I think everything is fine for every event except for PAYMENT.SALE.COMPLETED. Here I receive the event notification, verify, process and respond with a small html page (some regular description page) with http status 200. When I go back to the paypal developer dashboard I see the event still being PENDING. The exact same event is not being resend, as it would be the case if i would have responded with any other http status code than 2xx.
What is the reason for this PAYMENT.SALE.COMPLETED event always being PENDING. Do I have to take some additional action for this event?
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PS: I am unsure the right place to ask this question
I have recently been working with PayPal invoices in an application. This application generates an invoice which the user then pays. It is then meant to listen to PayPals "Invoicing invoice paid" webhook. I have a application created, assigned it the necessary webhook and set the required URL. This is all done in PayPal Sandbox. No event is ever sent to the URL given, no request, no poll, nothing. Nothing is done at all and in the Webhook Event Logs there are no events visible. Am I doing something wrong?
Thanks
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)
I've set up webhooks in a PayPal sandbox account and receive them on my backend and verify them, getting back {verification_status: 'SUCCESS'}. However, the PayPal developer dashboard shows the webhooks as 'Pending', meaning they keep resending/retrying.
What needs to happen so I stop getting repeat webhooks?
For webhook delivery to be successful, the server receiving the webhook needs to respond with an HTTP status of 2xx -- rather than anything else, such as 4xx or 5xx or no response.
Verifying the webhook is for your own information, to confirm it was sent by PayPal and not some other (malicious/spoof) actor. You can also verify by checking the cryptographic signature rather than posting it back to the PayPal API.
We are using SpiceLogic's BuyNowButton control with dedicated IPN_Notified event handler. Our payment processing logic requires buyer's redirection back to shopper site and we are interested to do it from IPN_Notified event handler after all verification there pass. We have noticed that Server.Transfer doesn't work there (gets suppressed) if you try to run it from inside event handler. Response.Redirect works as expected but raises non-braking exception "Thread was being aborted". Our question is: "Is there any known bad in redirecting buyer from IPN_Notified that way? Will it work in real PayPal environment as it works in our dev environment now?"
IPN happens completely separate from the checkout experience. A redirect will not work there because it's an entirely separate server session / communication. It's not anything happening in the browser.
It sounds like you must be working with PayPal Standard, so if you want the user to be returned to a specific page on your site after checking out with PayPal you can look into setting up Auto-Return in the PayPal account. Even with that enabled, though, there is no guarantee the user will make it back to your site because they could simply close the browser before it redirects.
If you want to guarantee the user always gets back to your site you should move to using the Express Checkout APIs instead of PayPal Standard. It will require more coding skill and working with web services, but it will give you much more freedom to do exactly what you want to do with your user experience.
In the SpiceLogic PayPal Control, the IPN_Notified event is completely a service type event, which is triggered by the PayPal IPN Notification service. The consumer of this event is a backend service from PayPal, not your customer. Your customer will never be redirected anywhere whatever you perform in your IPN_Notified event.
When PayPal IPN service calls your IPN URL, the IPN_Notified event is fired from your SpiceLogic PayPal control. But, PayPal does not care about that. PayPal simply calls that IPN Url and Post transaction data and then returns. So, if you issue a Response. Redirect, it will do nothing to PayPal IPN service. Response. Redirect is an instruction for the Browser, but PayPal IPN service is not a browser which will redirect.
If you want your user to redirect or convey a message, you need to use the PayPal_Returned event from the SpiceLogic PayPal Control.
In order to understand better the IPN and event workflow, please check these images.
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?