As recommended by PayPal I am using a combination of the PayPal API and the IPN to create a 'Adaptive Payments' flow.
When my IPN listener receives a new notification from PayPal I have two options (after security checks):
1) Use the received data to make direct actions in my website (for example set a preapproval as approved)
or instead a more secure and clean way (I think):
2) Detect the transaction type variable (or other identifier) and request more details from PayPal accordingly.
For example if the 'transaction_type' is 'Adaptive Payment Preapproval' then I will use the received 'preapproval_key' to request the preapproval details using the PreapprovalDetails API call and then use the received data of that call to set the preapproval as approved.
Is this (option 2) the better way to go?
Thanks.
In general there is probably enough information in the IPN for you to act on, but IPNs are pretty confusing what with all the optional fields and the way that there is no payment_status or txn_id on subscribe events, and no subscription information on payment events, so marrying them up can be interesting. You may well find it easier to understand if you go ahead and get the relevant information from them for each IPN via their API as you suggest.
Related
Does the Paypal provides any api to retry the IPN message using message id? I need to integrate functionality similar to the "resend ipn" button available on IPN history page of paypal.
There is no API to trigger the resend of an IPN, but there are API's to obtain the details that would be included in an IPN for a given transaction, so depending on what you're doing that make work for you.
For example, the combination of TransactionSearch and GetTransactionDetails can be very useful.
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.
I need to track user payments on my site, but there is nothing in an IPN that I have been able to link to my original payment.
Some people suggested using the "custom" field (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11251109/paypal-button-sending-custom-variable-through-ipn), but that doesn't seem to be an option through the Adaptive Payments API.
So are there any fields I can attach to my Pay API call or my SetPaymentOptions API call that will a) be invisible to the user, and b) come back in the IPN so I can track the payment?
My only other options are to either track with the paykey (but that seems wrong since it is public and expires and a given transaction can have several paykeys), or to send the ipn notification to a tracked url such as www.example.com/payments/ipn/{transaction_id}
I'm just fairly shocked if there's no legitimate way for me to track a payment.
I think this could be of use to you:
https://www.x.com/developers/paypal/forums/mobile/how-fetch-invoice-data-using-adaptive-payments-api
I'm setting up a payment engine for a custom framework using PayPal Express Checkout. One of the business requirements is adding support for recurring payments. I've found documentation on how to implement this at https://cms.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/?cmd=_render-content&content_ID=developer/e_howto_api_ECRecurringPayments
The thing I don't quite understand is how to retrieve the value of BillingType from the API after I've set it via SetExpressCheckout to "RecurringPayments". It doesn't seem to appear anywhere in the response data I get back from neither GetExpressCheckoutDetails nor DoExpressCheckoutPayment. I need this to know whether I need to create a recurring payments profile or not. So as far as I can tell my only option is to store the value of BillingType in my database and query it again after DoExpressCheckoutPayment. This works for me but I find it odd that this data would not be returned at all by the API. Am I missing something? Or is there another way of correctly implementing recurring payments?
Not all data you send in a request is returned in a response. You already have what you're passing to them...there's really no need for them to pass it back.
You could use session variables to save the data instead of the database, or you could log all of your API requests and refer to those logs when you need to see what you sent, but again, your application is what's telling PayPal whether or not the payment should include billing agreement information...not the other way around.
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.