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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

#61
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…

Do you expect paypal to keep trying that IPN indefinitely?

They retry up to 15 times or 4 days[1].

[1] https://developer.paypal.com/webapps/developer/docs/classic/...

Re: Paypal has not been sending payment notifications to merchants

#62
We have been experiencing sudden weirdness with out PayPal Pro payment processing integration with our Magento cart over this time period. I have spent hours looking over logs and on support call with PayPal integration support. You would think that since PayPal and Magento are both part of eBays X.commerce that they would work together well.

I received a lot of "hmmm that's weird" and "well i've never seen the API do that" comments from the integration support specialist at PayPal."

What is happening for us is that Paypal is simultaneously sending a authorization and then a second later a capture. the results are weird some transactions process and other get a duplicate invoice it error.

Re: Paypal has not been sending payment notifications to merchants

#63
post #56
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 constan…

I was thinking racks of Alcatel-Lucent and stacks of Sagem, but perhaps you have a point.

Re: Paypal has not been sending payment notifications to merchants

#65
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I have utterly no idea what several items on Stripe's list are. Some that I tried looking up remain, at best, unclear to me.

Some of the items are extremely vague, even to the point of contradiction, or to the point of sweeping in huge amounts of activity that nobody should consider high-risk. For example:

"3. Virtual currency that can be monetized, re-sold or converted to physical or digital products or services or otherwise exit the virtual world"

So, implicitly, then, virtual currency that can't be easily converted back to real cash is fine. But:

"43. Quasi-cash or stored value"

This could describe a virtual currency that doesn't violate #3. But then:

"52. Selling video game or virtual world credits (unless you are the operator of the video game or virtual world)"

Make up your mind, Stripe.

Meanwhile, #2, "Weapons and munitions". Under US law, a PlayStation can be treated as a munition.

#4, "Sexually-oriented or pornographic products or services". So, no sex-ed materials, bad romance novels, or condoms.

#15, "Age restricted products or services", can be read to preclude any business that restricts signup by under-13s in order to be sure they meet the requirements of US federal law.

#31, "Extended warranties". So, this precludes pretty much everybody who offers a product customers might want long-term support for. Like, say, every computer manufacturer in history.

#41, "Prepaid phone cards, phone services or cell phones". This means a hypothetical electronics store can't sell cell phones -- even simple unlocked phones without plans.

#48, "Telecommunications equipment and telephone sales", would preclude the sale of any sort of networking equipment. Or, really, any piece of equipment capable of connecting with a network, including any general-purpose computer.

Companies should put the same care into the design and usability of their terms and conditions as they do into their products, because the former has a direct impact on the latter, and often makes for huge PR messes.

Re: Paypal has not been sending payment notifications to merchants

#66
post #18
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…

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…

Here is my solution to the encoding issues, let me know if it works for you (assuming your environment let you access the body of the request without parsing it, or already knows how to parse it correctly).

http://blog.cyberion.net/2014/08/parsing-paypal-ipn-requests...

Re: Paypal has not been sending payment notifications to merchants

#67

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…

Belt and suspenders, dude, belt and suspenders.

Re: Paypal has not been sending payment notifications to merchants

#68
post #67

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…

Belt and suspenders, dude, belt and suspenders.

When dealing with PayPal, go for an elastic waistband as well :)

Re: Paypal has not been sending payment notifications to merchants

#69
post #12
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...

They actually do the right thing with a 301 redirect, and re-post to the new URL. I did a site wide http->https redirect, and surprisingly the IPN script continued to work.

Re: Paypal has not been sending payment notifications to merchants

#70
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…

Interesting - we have still gotten IPNs which is why we didn't suspect anything.

Have you checked your web server logs? We had a problem a year ago where we were getting 403 errors (forbidden). It turns out that paypal's DNS was a bit screwy, so apache wasn't able to do a reverse dns lookup on the ip address, and it was therefore getting rejected by our server. I simply added the ip addresses of all of paypal's IPN servers to our Allow list, and we haven't missed any IPNs in the last year:

Allow from .paypal.com

Allow from 173.0.81.1

Allow from 173.0.81.33

Allow from 66.211.170.66

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