Does Payment Gateway “PayPal Donations” requires IPN?

BTW…here is the article I was referring to…

https://givewp.com/documentation/core/payment-gateways/paypal-standard/troubleshooting-ipn-issues

Hey @naisyo523,

Happy to clarify here.

Here’s the order of how GiveWP works with the payment gateway to process the donation:

1. The donor fills out the donation form and submits the donation.
2. A donation (and subscription, if applicable) is created on the GiveWP side and set to “pending.”
3. All of the information is sent to the gateway to process the transaction.
4. The gateway processes it and notifies the site (via the webhook or IPN) that it went through.
5. GiveWP processes that webhook/IPN and sets the donation to complete.

The new PayPal Donations gateway uses a webhook mechanism to alert the GiveWP site of a completed donation. In the past for the old PayPal gateways, it used the legacy IPN (short for Instant Payment Notification) system. If those donations are not being marked as “complete” on the GiveWP side of things, that’s an indication that the webhook is somehow not logging things correctly.

Unlike Stripe and some of our other payment gateways, there’s not a log on the payment gateway side (that I know of) that you can check to see what might be causing the problem.

If the webhook makes it through to GiveWP, and there ends up being a problem, it should be logged at Donations > Tools > Logs as an error. Let me know if you are seeing the problem there.

Otherwise, if there was a problem configuring the webhooks in the first place, that should be shown directly on the PayPal setting page at Donations > Settings > Payment Gateways > PayPal, with instructions on how to contact PayPal to get the problem fixed.

Let me know if you see errors in either of those places.

We can’t fix a problem until we can replicate it, and at this point, all PayPal donations problems have been very specific to PayPal accounts, and not to GiveWP settings or even server settings.

Once I can replicate a problem, I am happy to take a look.

Last but not least, if you have the Recurring Donations add-on and is a premium user, please reach us out via Priority Support (https://givewp.com/priority-support/), because we are not allowed to support premium plugins here.

Thanks for using GiveWP! Have a great day.

I have the same issue. Multiple websites using GiveWP getting the same issue, which is using PayPal Donations gateway, donation just hangs (spinning wheel on donate now) or white page after donation. Donation goes into PayPal successfully, no confirm page displayed nor emails delivered. PayPal payment gateway is successfully connected, so that is not the issue.

Follow up detail to my previous comments:
1. No errors in connecting to PayPal (either production or Sandbox) Gateway in GiveWP.
2. Using PayPal IPN Generator/Testing tool, PayPal indicates GiveWP is replying successfully.
3. Disabled WordFence – no change.
4. Disabled Cache plugin – no change.
5. PayPal sees all payments successfully.
6. Same symptom for both PayPal Donations and PayPal Standard gateway.
7. Wordfence seems to see a 200 return code on the Give Listener.
8. No way to verify the webhook or IPN is being honored by GiveWP as the transactions are all Pending, no confirmation email is sent, nor donation-confirmation screen displayed.
9. PayPal auto-return is set to the proper url for the donation-confirmation screen.
10. If I initiate a browser url of teh donation-confirmation page on the screen that has the spinning wheel (waiting) it does display the data from the giving, but does not send out an email or mark the gift as completed.

All of this seems to indicate that GiveWP is not getting what it needs in the response packet from PayPal (or getting it at all).

Any help is appreciated as I have followed every help article I can find and tried disabling all I can disable, tried different approaches, etc.

Using the Test Donation gateway works without issue.