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Paypal has not been sending payment notifications to merchants

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Re: Paypal has not been sending payment notifications to merchants

#21

Post by jcoby »

mgkimsal wrote: post #16

had this problem for years, along with google checkout's callback process. google was worse. they seemed to get to a point where if/when they'd ping, if the request took longer than a few seconds to reply, it would stop, then never retry.

Google Checkout was awful to work with. It was hard for the vendor to setup and use. It was hard to program against. It was hard for the customer to use. It was hard to test. And of course it had Google's famous lack of support.

Speaking of support, we qualified for the integration reward ($1500 or so; maybe more). We tried to claim the reward for over a year. Every time they'd say "yeah you totally qualify!" and we'd ask how to claim the reward and then silence. Of course every email response took 3-7 days. A few months later we'd go through the same process. Still waiting on that check to arrive.

We supported it for about a year and eventually gave up. Payment notifications could take up to a minute to arrive. You couldn't specify the tax (or shipping from what I remember) for an order in any sane way. For a while it was over 50% of our support tickets while being used by less than 10% of our customers and less than 1% of all transactions.

I was so happy to delete it from our codebase. And we won't support any payment processor they have to offer anytime soon.

Re: Paypal has not been sending payment notifications to merchants

#22

Post by LocalPCGuy »

WatchDog wrote: post #15

If your business process relies completely on a callback that can fail for plenty of different reasons, then your business process is broken.

Except that part of PayPal's business model is saying that you can depend on that callback. This isn't on the business here, it's on PayPal.

Now, I'd agree if you said that PayPal isn't suitable for a business to use, it should be relegated to the realm of individuals and small businesses who don't know better, but that's different than what you seem to be saying.

Re: Paypal has not been sending payment notifications to merchants

#23

Post by aaronem »

WatchDog wrote: post #15

If your business process relies completely on a callback that can fail for plenty of different reasons, then your business process is broken.

If your payment processor builds a product offering around a webhook which tells you when someone has paid for something, and that webhook fails hard at their end for over a week while no one there even notices, then your payment processor is broken.

Re: Paypal has not been sending payment notifications to merchants

#24

Post by aaronem »

Tegran wrote: post #12
erikcw wrote: post #4

Not sure if this is related to this particular case. From previous experience, PayPal will silently stop delivering IPNs if your webhook URL ever returns a non-200 status code for an extended period of time. It took us a fair amount of time to figure out that this was the cause of our issue -- the PayPal UI didn't indicate any problems and PayPal business customer support was unable to see the source of the problem e…

What about if it finds 301 or 302 codes (redirects)? I hope they don't count as a negative...

I wouldn't chance it; the first time I implemented IPNs, I had to spend almost a week on R&D aimed purely at discovering and working around all the undocumented fuckups.

Webhooks are not hard. That Paypal fails at them this badly makes me think their infrastructure is a (much larger) disaster waiting to happen; if I still did freelance work, I would be moving all of my clients to Stripe right now, before the next inevitable mishap.

Re: Paypal has not been sending payment notifications to merchants

#25

Post by thenduks »

You can make an API call to check the status of a transaction very easily.

When my users are redirected back to my site (thanks page, or similar), I check if their transaction is completed, if not, I kick off an every-five-seconds check while asking the user to hold on while we talk with paypal. I will eventually fail after some number of checks of course, but this means PayPal can stop sending IPNs and everything will just keep going along just fine.

If the user might not end up back on your site for some reason, run a cronjob that tries to verify transactions created in the past day/hour/whatever.

An issue like this doesn't have to, and really shouldn't, cripple your business.

Re: Paypal has not been sending payment notifications to merchants

#26

Post by jarcoal »

thenduks wrote: post #25

You can make an API call to check the status of a transaction very easily. When my users are redirected back to my site (thanks page, or similar), I check if their transaction is completed, if not, I kick off an every-five-seconds check while asking the user to hold on while we talk with paypal. I will eventually fail after some number of checks of course, but this means PayPal can stop sending IPNs and everything wi…

Agreed. It doesn't take a lot of working with PayPal to know the IPN system is fragile at best.

PaymentDetails is mandatory for any adaptive payments integration.

https://developer.paypal.com/docs/classic/api/adaptive-payme...

Re: Paypal has not been sending payment notifications to merchants

#27

Post by pbreit »

I'd be very surprised if IPN was down for several days, much less 9. Can anyone confirm such a thing?

IPN hasn't gotten much love in years but still pretty cool that it was (one of) the original webhooks back in 2001 and has worked decently for the past 13 years. In fact, an integration from 2001 should continue to work OK.

Re: Paypal has not been sending payment notifications to merchants

#28

Post by jephir »

contingencies wrote: post #10

If you've ever sat down and looked at Paypal's APIs properly, for instance with a view towards a proper risk analysis and/or from-scratch integration, then this should not surprise you. I did this for the first time perhaps ten years ago, and here's what I found. Firstly, the degree of marketing bullshit that you have to push through just to get to the truth of the APIs is staggering . Secondly, they perform backflip…

I would switch to Stripe if they offered micro-payment pricing like PayPal's 5c + 5%.

Re: Paypal has not been sending payment notifications to merchants

#30

Post by ejr »

driverdan wrote: post #29

Here's an idea, stop using shitty services like PayPal. Today it's IPNs failing, tomorrow they're locking your account and holding your money for 180+ days with no justification.

As much as people complain about them, I still haven't found a service that matches their reach or ease. Let's face it, PP is a de-facto bank without any of the regulations, requirements or safeguards.
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