Fabulous Plugin. One problem: What do I set at Paypal for IPN Notification URL?

You shouldn’t need to enable it at all with Give. Is there a specific advantage to enabling it for your use-case? Are your transactions going through correctly already? Help me understand the need and I can help better.

Thanks!

Thank you, Matt. It’s not that there’s a “specific advantage to enabling it” for this case, it’s just that I don’t know how on earth these transactions are otherwise being reported back to Give on my site! IPN is simply how it’s done in every single other such solution–except homebrew methods using Payment Data Transfer, which is not robust because it requires people know to hit the Return to Site button, which simply doesn’t happen a certain percentage of the time.

So yes, transactions seem to be going through, but how on earth is that being accomplished? Is it just being sent back via Payment Data Transfer when they click the “Return to Site” button after donating?

In which case, what happens when they don’t hit that button? Am I missing something?

I appreciate all the responses, by the way. Understanding how the information is being passed back to my site helps me to troubleshoot any possible issues.

Give has an IPN built into it automatically, but if you don’t have it enabled on your account then yes, it will default to the Payment Data Transfer. But that doesn’t only work if they hit that link, they are also automatically returned to your Donation Confirmation page after a few seconds. But yes, if they close the tab at PayPal after donating then it won’t notify Give of the success and after 7 days Give will automatically mark the donation as “Abandoned”.

Not sure I understand your response here either Matt. Are you saying that the give plugin somehow triggers IPN from paypal even if IPN has not been enabled within the target paypal account?

To enable IPN in paypal a notification url (from the give plugin host site) needs to be entered. Simply trying to enable IPN in paypal without providing a url prompts paypal to give this error message:

“You must enter a properly formatted URL into the Notification URL field in order to activate Instant Payment Notification.”

Interested to know if there is a default IPN listener url for paypal standard like there is for the paypal pro.

OK, actually, the best way to explain it is via our documentation. And the IPN really is only relevant for Recurring Donations. See here:
https://givewp.com/documentation/add-ons/recurring-donations/supported-payment-gateways/paypal-pro/

Let me know if that clarifies everything and whether you have additional follow-up questions at all.

Thanks!

But yes, if they close the tab at PayPal after donating then it won’t notify Give of the success and after 7 days Give will automatically mark the donation as “Abandoned”.

Thank you, Matt, However, this is precisely what I want to avoid. I want this to happen zero times, never, zilch. If it happens ONCE on a single donation, that is once too many. I want IPN every time. Even for non-recurring, one-time donations.

Your documentation was helpful for PayPal Pro, but we use PayPal Standard. We are a very small nonprofit, do not have the PayPal Pro add-on and can’t afford it. What URL do we enter in the Paypal IPN URL for PayPal Standard?

Just a nudge; you’ve been extremely helpful with your support. Just wondering about my prior post; we do not have PayPal Pro and want to know the IPN URL for just normal Paypal. Thank you!

Matt, any chance I could get a resolution on this issue? Thank you!

Hi @feame25 – I’m going to chime in here to answer your questions. First: “What URL do we enter in the Paypal IPN URL for PayPal Standard?” – For PayPal Standard you do not need to enter anything in here. With PayPal Standard we pass the URL for IPN pingback via their API.

You second question is about receiving the IPN requests reliably on your site. The first thing is you should have an SSL certificate if you have Give’s “Disable PayPal IPN Verification” option turned off:

Important: Use HTTPS to post messages back to PayPal for verification. PayPal no longer supports HTTP for post backs. For full details, see the IPN Verification Postback to HTTPS Microsite.

Source: https://developer.paypal.com/docs/classic/ipn/integration-guide/IPNSetup/

Otherwise, you can disable PayPal IPN verification. PayPal Standard’s IPN from my experience has been reliable when setup correct. The option you see in you PayPal account to “receive IPN requests” doesn’t matter if you are only using PayPal Standard.

• This reply was modified 8 years, 4 months ago by Devin Walker.

Thank you for the good explanation, Devin. We do have SSL, so that is not a problem.
One serious issue still remains: the one question I started this whole thread to get answered is still unanswered.

I cannot turn on IPN inside Paypal without entering a notification URL!
I understand now that Give is passing along a URL via the API; thank you for explaining that. However, IPN is still turned off on the Paypal side because I have no URL to enter in the settings of the Paypal website.

As I said originally, when I go into the Paypal settings for IPN (Selling Tools > Instant payment notifications > Choose IPN settings) the radio button is checked for “Do not receive IPN messages (Disabled).” I want to ENABLE them so that Give can actually use it. But I can’t, because I don’t know what URL to enter and for whatever baffling reason, after two months and a bunch of messages in this thread, nobody will tell me!!!

It’s kind of frustrating. I keep hearing back “hey no need for that; the plugin handles the URL via the API” but I can’t turn IPN on inside Paypal in the first place, unless someone finally tells me what to enter there. See what I mean?

Hey @frame25 – I get what you’re saying. Set the IPN url to https://nameofwebsite.com/?give-listener=IPN. That will allow you to enable the option like you said. Please let me know if you have any questions.

Thank you!!!!! You absolutely made our day. ??