PayPal, IPN and Gold R11

[sfeher]

We've got a new installation of Gold R11 (everything appears to be working well).
We installed and made the PayPal payment method available to our customers and we're seeing a problem now where orders are being marked as being 'placed' in the cart, but there's no transaction history inside PayPal. Orders placed online are always handled as "Auth only" because our client only collects payment once the product ships to the customer.

I'm wondering if anyone else has seen this kind of issue. I might try to test turning off the IPN and only using the API configuration (Paypal told the merchant that the API was better - more reliable - than IPN anyway). I just don' understand why the cart would show a payment history/authorization but there be no history in PayPal.

PayPal_pending.PNG

The 'result' in this detail shows that the payment is indeed "Pending" -- but since there's no amount and nothing shows up in PayPal, how can we authorize payment to be completed?
Does IPN require us to Auth/Capture in the same moment? Does API handle later Capture better?

Wondering if anyone else has struggled with this. Maybe we cannot handle "auth-only" payments in Paypal and will need to do auth/capture??

thanks!

[Katie]

Hi,

The payment has not been completed by the customer. It is not "authorized" in the sense that a normal payment gateway would work. The "Waiting for IPN" message indicates that AbleCommerce has not received any notification from Paypal saying the payment was made. This can happen if the user selects Paypal for the payment method, gets redirected to Paypal's website, and then never completes the payment. I know this has caused a lot of frustration for merchants, but there isn't anything we can do once the customer leaves the AC store. If the customer "cancels" from Paypal's website, they will be redirected back to the receipt page with the 'Pay Now with Paypal' button available to make a payment.

The only thing I can suggest is to either remove the std. Paypal payments option, or add some bright red text to the receipt page to let the customer know that the order is not completed until a payment is made. You might want to use Paypal sandbox mode to do some testing of your own and see how this works.

Hope this helps,
Katie

[AbleMods]

We recently ran into a situation where PayPal IPN stopped working. The cause was the email address configured in the AbleCommerce PayPal payment gateway.

That email address MUST be the PRIMARY PayPal email address for the PayPal account. It cannot be any other email address, even if the address has full rights to that paypal account.

It MUST be the primary paypal email address.

Took us a while to figure out something that was so simple in the end