Payment status remains "Pending" - paypal

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

Related

PayPal refunds not generating IPN anymore

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

Order of IPN returns when setting up subscriptions

Gidday
I'm setting up several subscribe buttons on my site, each without a free trial period, so the initial two IPNs, subscr_signup and subscr_payment are sent about the same time. I'm using the custom field in the IPN to hold the user's membership ID from my site (subscription is separate from signing up for an account).
I've read that Paypal doesn't always send those two IPNs them in that order.
Initially I was going to use the subscr_signup IPN to populate the member's subscription details, but I'm wondering, am I better off using the subscr_payment IPN to do that ie check if a sub has been set up, and if not set one up, otherwise just check the subscr_payment details against the database?
The payment IPN doesn't have the recurring field, but I don't need it, as all subscriptions are recurring on my site, and I can determine the type of subscription from the amount paid.
Or, would it be better if I set it up as a 1 day free trial, so the IPNs definitely come separately?
Thanks for your time and help.
Either way should work. Another option that some merchants have done, is written all of the information to their database and set up the account before sending the buyer over to PayPal to sign up and make the payment. Then the merchants would rely on the IPN to actually activate the IPN or activate it beyond it's free trial period. You could also set up a script to check your system periodically to see if there are any profiles that are deactivated and should be removed from your system, or that never paid.

Paypal ExpressCheckout + chained Payment

I developed a Web Application that accepts payments via the ExpressCheckout API, for users to become a members.
Everything works fine.
I now want to extend my Web Application Services and offer my users with the possibility to buy items which are sold by third parties (my members).
The principle I would like to implement is quite simple: for each order, let the user pay for the item they choose and then transfer a part of the amount I received to the item provider, and keep some money for me. I would like to automate this process so that once I received the payment notification, I compute the amount of money to transfer to the item provider who might or not have a Paypal account (in other words, this means that I could maybe need to transfer the money to a bank account, using the IBAN/SWIFT data) and then proceed with the money transfer.
I tried to find a solution reading your documentation and came across the "chained payment" but the latter does not seem to be used within the ExpressCheckout workflow.
Also, since my implementation of the ExpressCheckout flow works, I would not like to have to find a totally different solution but rather extend it... if possible.
Could you please tell me which is the best solution for me?
In advance, many thanks for your help.
You could do 1 of 2 things. You could use Express Checkout with parallel payments. This means you could split the transaction up between different accounts at the time of purchase. The other option would be to just receive all of the funds into your account, and then when you are wanting to send money to the other accounts you could either use the Adaptive Payments (Pay) API or the MassPayments API to send money to the other accounts. Keep in mind you would have to send it to their PayPal accounts, you would not be able to send it directly to a bank account with either one of these API's.
I had the same issue and I got an answer from PayPal that it is not allowed to use Express Checkout to transfer money to your PayPal account and - at a later point in time - transfer the amount minus your service fee (which stays on your PayPal account) via Adapative Payments API to the seller's PayPal account. PayPal suggested to use Chained Payments API instead. All works fine in the sandbox, but once you need a Live APP ID from PayPal they will review your business case and deny it. At least that what happened to me.
I know that is old question, but anyway, I tried to find solution and was enable to perform the simillar thing like described in question. So, then I asked paypal about this, and they gave me advice to use SellerDetailsType Fields that 's called PayPalAccountID, description for this field is Unique identifier for the merchant. For parallel payments, this field is required and must contain the Payer Id or the email address of the merchant. It wasn't clear for me to use this field for solving my problem. Here is link https://developer.paypal.com/webapps/developer/docs/classic/api/merchant/SetExpressCheckout_API_Operation_SOAP/ I described field for soap request, for NVP it's called PAYMENTREQUEST_n_SELLERPAYPALACCOUNTID, but the idea is the same. I hope it will help someone.

How to verify paypal reference transactions is enabled

Hi I'm setting up paypal pro for a client. I need reference transactions to work as we would have to bill the customer each month and sometimes the amount may vary.
Credit card payment
The code flow has been tested with paypal sandbox and it completely works. But with the real account we get the following error.
"This transaction cannot be processed. Please contact PayPal Customer Service."
Paypal Account Payment/Express Checkout
It did not work with paypal sandbox too owing to reference transactions not being enabled. i'm facing a similar situation with the paypal pro account too. I get the error
"Merchant not enabled for reference transactions"
We sent a request to paypal asking them to enable reference transactions. They replied back assuring they did but I still get the same error. I even tried removing the current api signature and recreating a new one. But I still get the same error.
Has anyone faced a similar situation ?
Is there any sure way of verifying if reference transactions is enabled?
If it is not, is there a way to enable it other than going through paypal's customer service (it's appalling) ?
Yes it's easy.
Just try to make a payment with a billing agreement.
Just above the confirmation message on the PayPal website it will show:
Use PayPal for future payments to XXX Inc. Payments will be made with
your default payment method unless you select a preferred payment
method. To make changes, go to My money in your Profile, and update
the My preapproved payments section.
If you don't see that message they're not enabled (or your request is wrong). But of course you can check in the sandbox to make sure the request is correct.

How do I deal with PayPal customers who can't direct return

PayPal states:
Note: If you have turned on Auto
Return and have chosen to turn on
PayPal Account Optional for new users,
a new user will not be automatically
directed back to your website, but
will be given the option to return.
But if some of the customers don't get "Auto Returned", how do I handle them programmatically?
Paypal does not guarantee autoreturn especially when Paypal Account - optional setting is on.
The right way to handle the integration is with Instant Payment Notification (IPN) option. Using IPN Paypal will make POSTS to your page notifying you of payment events. The following link explains the IPN process pretty well.
To summarize, you will write code that will trap posts from Paypal and then make sure to update your billing data accordingly.
Also, IPN messages might be slightly delayed.
Create a script (cron or what) that does check for such payments at paypal perodically (e.g. every hour).
Is this what you mean?
https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=p/mer/express_return_summary-outside
If not, you may need to be a little more specific with your question. Like - are you using paypal pro? How are your customers checking out? etc. And now that I read the answer below mine, I wonder if you are even talking about the payment process and not something else.