41–50 of 77 posts
There are many reasons why an IPN will fail. Like having your firewall settings messed up, network issues on your or PayPal's side, PayPal actually sending an IPN but your infrastructure not making use of its information...
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.
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…
IPNs are annoyingly difficult to use. Some accounts simply will not send them until an IPN URL is set, even for transactions that include the notify_url in the request. You cannot even see the IPN history until you enter an IPN URL, even if it was used through the notify_url param. IPNs that include UTF8 characters will not validate by default in most PayPal accounts. PayPal defaults to Win1252, translates the UTF8 c…
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Hell, I had no idea that Stripe's prohibited businesses list was so ... massive. The list runs the gamut from "risky" to "value judgement", and I can't help but wonder how all those items ended up on the same list.
Some are clearly legal liabilities. The rest almost certainly have high fraud/chargeback rates. Can you imagine how many people must dispute what they paid to a psychic
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.
It's important to be careful about jumping to drastic conclusions when debugging a connection like this.
E.g., from the OP:
> I called Paypal Technical Support to verify exactly what we were seeing. Sure enough, they had received other calls today about this exact issue. Other vendors were not receiving IPNs for their orders. The ticket for this "critical bug" was created today.
> The problem with that fact is that our customer's order was from 9 days ago. For at least 9 days (we are going through all of our partial orders now to see the full extent of this bug), Paypal was not sending IPNs to merchants and did not know.
This doesn't actually follow logically. The tech support rep mentioned getting other calls about IPNs not going through does not mean NO other IPNs were going through. Likewise, if Tindie has actually not gotten any IPNs for 9 days, that doesn't indicate anything about the other millions of PayPal merchants.
This reminds me a bit of customers who call in a panic that "your entire website is broken!", and after a bit of discussion it becomes clear that their internet connection is down.
The same stream of events could be caused by lots of things, including minor configuration changes on Tindie's end.
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...
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ease of use is still kind of key for me. I pay a lot of people in Europe / Asia and if it weren't for paypal I'd literally have to make a trip to my supermarket Western Union twice a week.
Yes, exactly. When I tell people where they need to send funds, their first question is "do you have a PayPal account?" Western Union, Moneygram and such are all highly inconvenient for both parties. And services like Stripe aren't an option for me due to their restrictions on use as well https://stripe.com/us/prohibited_businesses My work covers multiple items on that list. Compare that to PayPal's https://www.paypa…
But the real problem with Stripe is simply that it's not available in almost any country. They're too small to have the resources to read the laws and open bank accounts outside America.
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.
So the question is if you want these people's money or if you are willing to take a hit in sales just to stick it to PayPal.
b) IPN is clearly going to be flakey, there are several reasons why IPNs might not be delivered and they are not all paypal issues. In the paypal docs it says that if your webhook doesn't return 200 to some IPNs then it will stop sending them. For my new stuff I don't use paypal at all (stripe is just too good) but when I did I had a cron job running every 5 minutes that checked every transaction that had been created but no IPN had come through for. Over the cause of a couple of years I caught several transactions where the IPN had been lost.
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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...
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It is an https request. The internet is not bulletproof. What if your SSL cert expires, or due to being on the front page your webhook is timing out? Do you expect paypal to keep trying that IPN indefinitely? I hate paypal and all my new stuff uses stripe but any system that relies upon a request being made to notify of a transaction is not going to be bulletproof due to the nature of the internet.