I am working on a subscription system that integrates payments through CC and paypal account, the problem happens in delay in activating the recurring profile of subscribers paying through CC.
I am using "CreateRecurringPaymentsProfile" API call for creating recurring profile. Initially I relied solely on IPN messages for payment confirmation, but there are delays in receiving these sometimes for few hours, for some users, but since IPN messages are only initiated with changes made in merchant's account, i believe the transfer of money could take time, and thus the delay.
I then thought of momentarily activating the profile based on instant responses from "CreateRecurringPaymentsProfile" and then the account is deactivated if we subsequently receive a IPN messages of txn_type payment skipped. My question is how most sites implement instant activating recurring payments using paypal api and is SUCCESS response from "CreateRecurringPaymentsProfile" is reliable to indicate that payment has happened?
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On our website we have option to pay using PayPal. At the time of signup our sytem creates recurring profile in users PayPal account and then till the account continue we receive recurring Payments.
On every successful payment PayPal send us the notifications with transaction details and we updates our system.
Sometimes our system miss the IPN notifications due to outage and as a result our system goes out of sync and does not updates the payments.
I would like to know do we have any PayPal API which we can call to get the transaction details of missing IPN notifications?
How to handle these transactions which are not updated in our system and IPN we ave missed?
I'm not a developer, but a project manager. So please excuse my lack of proper language.
We are trying to figure out how to handle subscription refunds and then limit account access on the site.
Here's a scenario. Member signs up for an annual subscription to gain certain capabilities in the account. 3 months into it member decides to cancel and requests a refund. Normally, if no refund is issued, subscription is good until the end of the billing period, at which point account is deactivated.
In our case, if a refund is issued, account should be deactivated immediately. Question: is it possible to set this up as part of PayPal Subscriptions? Some type of call from PayPal to our system that will trigger account deactivation.
Thank you.
We recommend using IPN (Instant Payment Notifications) to be asynchronously notified of any events, in this case of those related to existing subscription/recurring payments.
https://developer.paypal.com/webapps/developer/docs/classic/ipn/gs_IPN/
If you enable IPN notifications you will receive a POST of PayPal in the following events (among others):
When a recurring profile is cancelled.
When a refund has been made to a previous completed transaction.
This way, you can set up your IPN script to keep the subscription “open” in your side for the remainder of the month even if the profile has been cancelled, or to deactivate it if the last month has been refunded.
For more information about IPN variables:
https://developer.paypal.com/docs/classic/ipn/integration-guide/IPNandPDTVariables/
Could anybody please tell me what happen if payment is made on PayPal but IPN is not triggered because server is down on merchant website.
How paypal will check and authorize the payment on merchant server?
IPN is an (optional) notification service, it isn't related to the transaction (aka "checkout flow", "payment flow") per se. It notifies the receiver (of the IPN message) of event(s) in transactions that occur at Paypal.
Instant Payment Notification
Instant Payment Notification (IPN) is a message service that automatically notifies merchants of events related to PayPal transactions. Merchants can use it to automate back-office and administrative functions, like automatically fulfilling orders and providing customers with order status.
...
Using IPN in your checkout flow
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.
Hth..
Is there any need to use IPN with
1. EXPRESSCHECKOUT (SETEXPRESSCHECKOUT => DOEXPRESSCHECKOUT)
2. RECURRING PAYMENT (SUBSCRIPTION)
It depends on how you operate your business...
If you ship physical goods, then, of course a human will check if you received a payment before you send the goods to the customer...
But with digital goods it's another story, you want to deliver the digital content as soon as you get the payment in your account. That's the main usage for IPN. If you get the IPN confirmation, you fire an email with a download link directly to the customer's email.
Other use cases would be, automate tasks, like accounting, mailing, renewing subscription status, reverting all you need to revert in case you get a payment cancelled notification, etc.
Yes, IPN can be very useful with any PayPal transactions. It is simply a POST of transaction data sent to your listener script on your server. This script receives the data and can process it however you wish, which allows you to automate tasks like updating databases, sending custom email notifications, hitting 3rd party web services, etc.
IPN works with all transactions once you have it configured, so you can use it to process payments, refunds, disputes, cleared e-checks, subscription payments, canceled profiles, suspended profiles, etc.
Whether or not you need to utilize it is up to you and your project requirements, but it is indeed very useful for Express Checkout, Subscriptions, and any other transaction types.
We're using PayPal Payments Standard and IPN to process payment transactions and enable digital goods download after our IPN listener script recieves notification of a completed transaction.
We've done thorough testing on the PayPal sandbox and made sure our scripts handle different scenarios properly.
Just to be sure, before opening the sales to public, we've done some testing with the PayPal live interface - performed a few small sales using a previously verified PayPal account to pay for the goods.
Our IPN listener script has immediately received notifications, but the payment_status in both of them was 'pending' with pending_reason = 'paymentreview'. After logging to our seller PayPal account a few minutes after making the payment, both transactions have the status 'Completed' and are ready to ship, yet our IPN listener did not receive any further notification updating the status of the transactions.
By checking the IPN history on our seller PayPal account, we can see that only the initial messages for both payments have been sent (with status 'Pending').
The PayPal developer docs are explicit about not allowing the download or shipping goods before the transaction is succesfully completed, yet we do not receive an update via IPN even 48+ hours after the payments.
We did not experience any such problem during testing period on PayPal sandbox interface.
Is this an issue with the IPN interface, or there is something that can be configured through our PayPal account that will resolve this issue and make IPN behaviour consistant with PayPal developer docs?