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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

#51

Post by abritishguy »

huhtenberg wrote: post #48
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.

You need to understand that there's a large slice of users who use PayPal exclusively, because they perceive it as a safer online payment option. These users see a credit card payment form (say, hooked up to Stripe), they panic and they start sending "who the hell do you think you are to be asking for my credit card number?" emails. We tried arguing, we tried explaining that we don't see the CC info and that we are g…

Depends heavily on your target market.

I thought this, so when I moved to stripe I retained a pay with paypal option (and braintree makes this very easy now) but it was hardly used so I just got rid of it. I still use paypal for some really old stuff that I can't be bothered to update but all my new stuff is stripe only.

Re: Paypal has not been sending payment notifications to merchants

#52

Post by [deleted] »

abritishguy wrote: post #50
[deleted] wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[deleted]

> utterly bullet proof 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 inter…

[deleted]

Re: Paypal has not been sending payment notifications to merchants

#53

Post by jasonlotito »

mietek wrote: post #44
eli wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

What about "48. Telecommunications equipment and telephone sales"?

What about it? Telephone sales are high risk.

Re: Paypal has not been sending payment notifications to merchants

#54

Post by r1ch »

jtheory wrote: post #45
pbreit wrote: post #27

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 certainly not generally down for everyone. I've not seen any oddities in IPN for a few years, and can confirm notifications have gone through over the past few days. 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 a…

IPNs were unaffected for us. This probably only affected a small segment of customers.

Re: Paypal has not been sending payment notifications to merchants

#55

Post by WatchDog »

aaronem wrote: post #23
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.

One anecdote is hardly evidence of their service being down for a week, more likely it was an issue with the merchant site or some intermediary. Having experience running a service similar to PayPal's IPN, the most common problems are invalid certificate chains on the webhook URL or some other misconfiguration or blacklisting. Unfortunately webhooks are usually work most of the time that people dont think they need to implement a secondary system to check on pending transactions.

Re: Paypal has not been sending payment notifications to merchants

#56

Post by eli »

mietek wrote: post #44
eli wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

What about "48. Telecommunications equipment and telephone sales"?

Yes. A quick google reveals:

> Telecom – The telecommunications industry is much more proficient with technology than it used to be. However, once services have been provided, recipients may dispute them. Card-not-present transactions are a mainstay for telecom companies. http://www.aliantpayments.com/who-we-service/high-risk-proce...

I would imagine that things like VoIP service are targeted by criminals who constantly need new, anonymous phone numbers for other scams.

Stripe's real business is measuring and assessing risk. The moving dollars around is the easy part.

Re: Paypal has not been sending payment notifications to merchants

#57

Post by eli »

ejr wrote: post #30
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.

In Europe (and I think some states) Paypal is a fully licensed as a bank.

Re: Paypal has not been sending payment notifications to merchants

#58

Post by eli »

Yardlink wrote: post #47
ejr wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Wow - "Engaging in any form of licensed or unlicensed aggregation or factoring" Lucky I don't use Stripe to sell my scientific software which does unlicensed factoring of large matrices and also sell "Personal computer technical support" to help customers who have problems using it. 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 rea…

I think they meant this kind of factoring: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factoring_(finance)

Re: Paypal has not been sending payment notifications to merchants

#59

Post by elliottcarlson »

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 - the statement of "Because of how critical IPNs are to any Paypal integration, we didn't think to double check if IPNs were not being sent." is exactly why you should double check - anything that is critical needs tests and backup solutions.
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