I'm currently using PayPal's adaptive payment system to process purchases on my e-commerce platform.
This has been working successfully for the past 5 years. Last week, there was a situation where my platform's system did not record IPN responses from PayPal. This was an intermittent issue. Lets say, 5 transactions were made in a day - 3 were recorded and 2 weren't. Note that there was no code change done in recent times. I also tried resending IPN messages from PayPal's IPN history page, but to no success.
On contacting PayPal, I was asked to check my IPN listener, which again had no issues. I'm quite puzzled as to what might be causing these issues.
In the last 24 hours, all the transactions stopped receiving IPN messages. On checking PayPal's IPN history page to retry sending IPN messages, I could not find any of the messages for the transactions that happened today. I am unable to process confirmation numbers for my customers without the IPN message from PayPal.
Any insights to this issue would be greatly appreciated.
This may not be the silver bullet answer you're looking for but I'm in a similar position as you. We've only been intermittently receiving IPN messages from Adaptive Payments for the past few days. Other IPN messages seem unaffected. Last night we received a number of IPN messages from transactions as far back as 5 days ago and as of today everything appears to be normal. I have no idea what was wrong and so I'm not ready to call it "fixed", but I'm hopeful.
The only action I've taken (besides spending the past two days manually confirming payments), was opening a ticket at paypal-support.com. I can't say for certain if that had any effect as they have yet to tell me if they've taken any action, only asked for more details.
As a side note, I can't find any service status pages for Adaptive Payments. Presumably this is because it's a limited release product, however it's slightly frustrating as we do depend on it until PayPal offers a better alternative for chained payments to multiple endpoints.
I have a web site thats been operating for months, if not years. It takes payments via PayPal. IPNs are used to track the payment status against an order.
If the paypal account owner issues a refund, the IPN from that is tracked, and the order updated with the amount refunded.
Now: The problem: This was all working in February 2015. But since then I have made 4 refunds (buy logging into the PayPal website and refunding). Each one was days apart. In each case they were partial refunds.
In all cases the monies have reached the recipient, and logged transactions IDs etc in PayPal.
The first one, I never received the IPN.
The second one I did received the IPN (and decided the first one must have been a glitch, unusal though it would seem)
However the third and fourth also have not generated an IPN that I received.
From looking at the Apache logs, there appears to not have been even an attempt from notify.paypal.com that Apache received.
So I am much puzzled, have googled around but not found anything. Can anyone suggest what I have missed that have caused these IPNs to stop?
Perhaps I should add that I continue to receive all the payment notification IPNs just fine. It seems to be just the refunds that I miss.
I thought at one time there was a flag about IPNs in settings, but I can't see it anywhere in the new web interface.
Regards
Monathan
I integrated PayPal in my web shop in order to allow instant payments with automatic product delivery (already had this before but only with instant wire transfers via sofort.com). I integrated it with the help of the example provided by PayPal (I'm using ReviewOrder.php, GetExpressCheckoutDetails and DoExpressCheckoutPayment).
It's working great if they pay with PayPal balance or a linked credit card. However, some customers from Germany don't have balance in their accounts but only a bank account linked to their account. The payments go through and they receive their product, however I noticed the payment status would remain "Pending" for 1 month and change to "Expired" afterwards, so effectively no money arrives.
Why is this happening? Or is there any way to deny such payments? (Payments from backup funds)
Any help would be appreciated.
Its hare to day with out looking at the transaction specifically. But there are several things that can cause your payment to be pending, such as your preferences that you may have set in the account. Check to make sure you dont have your preferences set to ask me before accepting a payment in a currency that you do not hold. Did the buyer pay with an eCheck? If so, it could be waiting for the payment to clear. If this is in the sandbox, you have to manually clear the payment. If you are still not able to determine the cause of the pending payment, if you provide the transaction id, I will check it on my end.
Hey guys I managed to find a solution to this odd problem after all.
It turned out I had the following code in my implementation where I actually initialized the payment process:
$_REQUEST['paymentType'] = "Order";
This was a mistake though, since this payment type won't place a hold on the funds and if the DoCapture call is never called this payment will remain pending for about one month and then expire entirely (as described in my question, so this is what actually happened to me). The bad thing is that it's impossible for such payments to even accept them manually from within PayPal (not even the local PayPal phone support was able/wanted to accept these payments for unknown reasons because they told me they'd come up with a solution and contact me via Email within 24 hours but they never did).
So in order to fix this issue I changed the payment type to Sale which instantly captures the payment rather than waiting for sort of approval or a capture call. It worked fine for two weeks now and I think I'll leave it like this now.
$_REQUEST['paymentType'] = "Sale";
I lost about 110€ because this stupidly trivial detail but at least it's working fine now and I was able to re-enable PayPal as a payment form. I hope they'll at least add an option to manually accept these payments if the DoCapture call was not implemented because it worked fine without it for most of the payments as well and after all this is still about real money, so this absolutely would be an essential thing to have....
This can happen also if you are trying to accept a payment in a different currency of your account. To avoid that you must create a "PayPal balance" in the currency of the payment.
IPN is also giving hints on the pending reason in this case:
[pending_reason] => multi_currency
Are there times that Paypal IPN notifications fails?
Does it work 100%?
I have problem right now.. Most of the time it works but I just now, it stop working for now reason.
I need it to work 100% so that I can add a record on my database about the transaction. And know if it fails or not.
Does anyone has the same experience?
Always paypal will return the IPN. But some occasions it might delay for even days. So we cant't rely on IPN 100%. So better way to do it will be to use both IPN and PDT together. If the data is not updated using IPN we can check it an use PDT to update our database.
I'd like to test paypal subscription IPNs, both the ones received when a subscription is created, and the ones sent later with the next payment (such as monthly if the subscription is $x per month).
However I'd prefer not to wait a month or a day to receive the second IPN. Is there a way to have an IPN sent quicker, such as hourly, using paypal or their sandbox?
On the documentation it says you can only specify years, months, days, and weeks as the subscription period.
PayPal's developer support and documentation is an embarrassment to them. But this particular limitation isn't as debilitating as it seems at first blush.
For testing, define your recurring payment to not have a free trial. When you create a new subscription, your server will receive two IPN messages in quick succession, one to create the subscription and the second to apply a payment. That's basically all you need to test.
If you have a free trial, you'll get basically the same pair of messages, just with a trial period between them. :)
The first message ("create subscription") will look something like this. Note the 'txn_type' -- that's the key bit of information for disambiguating the two messages:
{
"txn_type"=>"subscr_signup",
"subscr_id"=>"unique_id",
"verify_sign"=>"random_gibberish",
"item_number"=>"your_subscription_name"
"subscr_date"=>"14:32:23 Feb 15, 2010 PST",
"btn_id"=>"1111111",
"item_name"=>"Your Subscription Description",
"recurring"=>"1",
"period1"=>"1 M",
# This example is from a "free trial" IPN notification-- if you don't have a
# free trial defined, there will only be 'period1' fields, and they'll
# have the data that appears here in the 'period3' fields.
"amount1"=>"0.00",
"mc_amount1"=>"0.00",
"period3"=>"1 M",
"amount3"=>"34.95",
"mc_amount3"=>"34.95",
"mc_currency"=>"USD",
"payer_status"=>"verified",
"payer_id"=>"payer_unique_id",
"first_name"=>"Test",
"last_name"=>"User",
"payer_email"=>"test_xxxx#example.com",
"residence_country"=>"US",
"business"=>"seller_xxxxxxx#example.com",
"receiver_email"=>"seller_xxxxxxx#example.com",
"reattempt"=>"1",
"charset"=>"windows-1252","notify_version"=>"2.9","test_ipn"=>"1",
}
The second message is the more interesting one in this case. It will essentially be the exact same message you'll get later when the recurring payment is applied. It looks something like this:
{
"txn_type"=>"subscr_payment",
"subscr_id"=>"unique_id",
"verify_sign"=>"random_gibberish",
"txn_id"=>"payment_unique_id",
"payment_status"=>"Completed",
"payment_date"=>"12:45:33 Feb 16, 2010 PST",
"item_number"=>"your_subscription_name"
"subscr_date"=>"14:32:23 Feb 15, 2010 PST",
"custom"=>"data-you-sent-in-a-custom-field",
"id"=>"1",
"payment_gross"=>"34.95",
"mc_currency"=>"USD",
"payment_type"=>"instant",
"payment_fee"=>"1.31",
"payer_status"=>"verified",
"mc_fee"=>"1.31",
"mc_gross"=>"34.95",
"btn_id"=>"1111111",
"payer_id"=>"payer_unique_id",
"first_name"=>"Test",
"last_name"=>"User",
"payer_email"=>"test_xxxx#example.com",
"residence_country"=>"US",
"receiver_id"=>"your_merchant_id",
"business"=>"seller_xxxxxxx#example.com",
"receiver_email"=>"seller_xxxxxxx#example.com",
"protection_eligibility"=>"Ineligible",
"transaction_subject"=>"",
"charset"=>"windows-1252","notify_version"=>"2.9","test_ipn"=>"1",
}
So you can do almost all of your testing without waiting a day. By the time you think you've got it nailed down, you'll be receiving lots of subscription IPN messages the next day.
In addition, here is a link to PayPal's documentation for further reference.
It's possible to resend test IPNs, so you should only need to 'buy' one subscription for testing.
Once you've bought one subscription, here's what to do:
Log into your PayPal sandbox seller account.
Select 'Profile' => 'My Selling Preferences'.
Select 'Instant Payment Notification Preferences' from the third column.
Confirm that IPN is enabled and that the URL is correct.
Click the link to the IPN History page.
Scroll down, tick one or more IPNs and click 'Resend'.
After you confirm, the selected IPN(s) will now be resent to the URL you have specified. You can repeat an unlimited number of times with the same IPN(s).
The excellent answer by #dondo covers the rest.
It used to be that the period specified in days would be treated by the test server as minutes so you'd be called every 3 minutes when specified 'd3'. I think they removed this and I'm not aware of any replacement feature to test subscriptions.
Hey I just wanted to throw a shout out to Neil because that is exactly what I was looking for and I don't have enough reputation to reply or upvote..
Believe it or not paypal still doesn't make it easy to do subscription testing with ipn files :/
So, just because I didn't see it on here and the OP kind of sounded like they were under the impression to only expect two possible responses from papal --
if anyone else is having issues, here are some other txn_type that hit my ipn while doing testing:
//when paypal subscription profile is created for the subscriber
subscr_signup
//payment made for a given billing cycle
subscr_payment
//when subscription fails
subscr_failed
//user cancels subscription - not
subscr_cancel
//end of term - paypal is "done" with that subscriber
subscr_eot
//why I was looking for this thread to begin with lol
recurring_payment_suspended_due_to_max_failed_payment
that last one hit my ipn this morning against every last one of my test subscribers. when I was looking up what that meant, I found that the following are also possible to get:
recurring_payment_profile_created
recurring_payment_profile_cancel
recurring_payment_profile_modify
recurring_payment
recurring_payment_skipped
recurring_payment_failed
I don't know what I did to get that because subscriptions and recurring payments are technically different in PayPal's eyes (subscriptions can possibly never terminate but recurring payments have a cap on the total payments someone can make for any "subscription") but their documentation isn't always straight forward, either, so I dunno. That I'm still working on figuring out as this was a subscription button generated by a sandbox merchant account but whatever.
Happy headaches :)
UPDATE:
I figured out my problem just now - so just so it sounds like I know what I'm doing I'll explain...
I think paypal's subscription sandbox environment is slowly dying. I noticed the other day when I'm messing around in sandbox.paypal.com that I get "Fatal Failure" a lot of times. Refreshing the page seems to correct this most times, although sometimes i have to refresh a few times for the screen to come back.
I am getting the same response from them hitting my IPN file, which explains why every subscription I had got suspended today. Thanks to Neil I was able to resend the IPN response and I captured it into a text file (lol) and then I hit the ipn file reading in the response and throw it back at paypal (its really more complicated than that I'm just making it sound easy).
In any case by refreshing the page I can initiate the paypal handshake more or less on demand and when I do, it's 50/50 - sometimes I get VERIFIED, and sometimes I get Fatal Failure - just like when I try to do much of anything in their sandbox site (Fatal Failure).
Below is an example of part of a failed response I get from them... I get a 200 so I believe hitting their server isn't the issue with connectivity, but I am starting to see a pattern with "Fatal Failure" here and this points to more their end than mine
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Tue, 29 Sep 2015 02:41:00 GMT
Server: Apache
Fatal Failure
you can also manually create IPN from their sandbox:
https://developer.paypal.com/cgi-bin/devscr?cmd=_ipn-link-session