Simple Commerce – Instant Payment Notification¶
The Simple Commerce Module and PayPal’s IPN (Instant Payment Notification) allow you to fully integrate PayPal with your store, automatically keeping track of purchases, and sending notification emails to both administrators and customers.
PayPal’s Instant Payment Notification service processes transactions on
their server, and notifies ExpressionEngine when the transaction is
complete, so purchases are not recorded in your store until they are
finalized.
Note
While you can still use Simple Commerce generated PayPal links to sell items to users browsing your site as guests, the Instant Payment Notification features, such as transaction recording and email notifications, will only work for purchases made by logged-in members of your site.
Note
In order for PayPal to be able to send payment notifications to your site, your site needs to be online and accessible to the public. If anything would prevent an unauthenticated user from visiting your site, PayPal will be unable to send payment notifications.
Enabling PayPal Instant Payment Notification¶
Please refer to PayPal’s instructions for the latest information. To enable Instant Payment Notification, login to PayPal, and select “Payment Notifications” from the Profile submenu. Provide PayPal with the ExpressionEngine notification URL by typing or pasting the URL shown in your Simple Commerce control panel.
User Contributed Notes
If you are in DEBUG mode and testing in the PayPal sandbox and not seeing purchases in the cp or receiving test IPNs, try a small, real transaction.
As Derek Jones says: “The Sandbox can be fairly complex to set up ...” read forum post
If you’re having trouble with orders not being tracked, make sure that the PayPal Account you specify in the Simple Commerce settings is your primary PayPal email address. If you specify a secondary PayPal email address then transactions will always fail.
This is because EE checks that the money was sent to the correct email address by looking at the receiver_email value that PayPal provides. Unfortunately that value will always be the account’s primary email address, so if you’re using a secondary address no match will ever be found and orders will never be processed.
You must either have an EllisLab product license and have attained a forum rank of "Lab Assistant" (50 posts) to contribute notes to the User Guide