PayPal IPN is a completely separate feature from PayPal Webhooks.
- Even though it's the exact same concept _(argh!).
PayPal IPN is associated with your normal/business PaypPal account. It is is not a part of the PayPal Developer experience.
Also, PayPal IPN is now clearly deprecated, if not effectively obsolete, so if your application code is still reliant on PayPal IPN you really should update it to use PayPal Developer APIs and the Webhook service instead.

Anyway, here's the steps I took to find it today on 1st May, 20222:

Start off on your PayPal Business Account Dashboard page:
- https://www.paypal.com/mep/dashboard
- It should look like this:
- Don't confuse this with the Developer Not
Use the top-left menu to go to Account Settings:
- https://www.paypal.com/businessmanage/account/accountAccess
On the Account Settings page, look for "Notifications" in the left-side menu:
- https://www.paypal.com/businessmanage/account/notifications
Then you'll see the link to PayPal Instant Payment Notifications.
- Annoyingly, they don't use the term "IPN" so Ctrl+Fing for that won't work.
Click the "Update" link (even though we aren't updating anything: we just want to see IPN History), and you'll be taken to a page belonging to Olde PayPal just with a new header:
- https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/customerprofileweb?cmd=_profile-ipn-notify
And the link to the History page is disguised in the page's text:
- https://www.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_display-ipns-history
And you'll be welcomed back-in-time to 2005 with a page that looks like this:

Upvotes: 1

SubGothius

Reputation: 914

The current PayPal for Business interface only provides a way to access IPN History if you have manually configured IPN in your PayPal account settings. In this case, you'd go to [your name] > Account Settings > Notifications > Instant Payment Notifications (click Update here), then the explanatory text there will include a link to the IPN History page.

However, that link would not appear if you have not manually configured IPN -- e.g., when your ecommerce platform automatically transmits IPN parameters to PayPal for each checkout. While you could manually enable IPN with a dummy Notification URL in order to get the IPN History link, this could result in PayPal completely disabling IPN for your PayPal account if they try sending any actual notifications to that dummy URL.

In that case, you can use this link to access IPN History directly once you're already logged into PayPal:
https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_display-ipns-history

Note that if you have not manually configured IPN in PayPal, you will see a notice in IPN History saying, "The IPN feature is turned off. You must turn on IPN in order to create history data." That notice is irrelevant if your ecommerce platform specs IPN dynamically for each checkout; in that scenario, you can still view/search your IPN History without manually turning on IPN there.

Upvotes: 78