CODEWITHSUNDEEP
paypalpaypal-ipnpaypal-sandbox
Alexandre Baptiste
Alexandre Baptiste

Reputation: 287

PayPal IPN - Auto return

I'm developing a merchant website and I'm working with Paypal right now. I found that using IPN and the auto return do the job I want.

I'm using NGROK to expose my localhost and everything works fine. However, when I take a look at NGROK terminal I see that PayPal is actually sending datas to my auto-return page first and THEN after something like 3 seconds sending the rest to my IPN file.

I did think that the right data processing was IPN then SUCCESS... Am I wrong? Is that because I'm using NGROK or localhost? Or maybe PayPal Sandbox?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 390

Answers (1)

Drew Angell
Drew Angell

Reputation: 26036

It sounds like you're mixing up PDT and IPN.

PDT = Payment Data Transfer. This is meant for use with Auto-Return, and the payment data gets sent back to your return URL so you can display it on screen. Database updates, email notifications, etc. should NOT be taking place here because there is no guarantee the user will make it back to the return URL even with Auto-Return enabled.

IPN = Instant Payment Notification. This is meant for post-transaction processing and is where you should handle db updates, email notifications, and anything else you need to make sure happens every time a transaction occurs. IPN also allows you to process things like e-check updates, refunds, customer disputes, etc. where no browser interaction was taking place at the time.

You can use both together, but the PDT URL and IPN URL should be different from each other. The PDT URL would be your return / thank you page, and again you would only display data here for the user's reference. The IPN URL would be a separate script that acts as a listener only.

Upvotes: 3

Related Questions