We can only log and process a sale after PayPal transmits IPN to us confirming Completed payment status. If you are seeing payments with Completed status in your PayPal account that aren't showing up in your E-junkie Transaction Log, that indicates PayPal has not sent us an IPN for those transactions yet.



It's possible the IPNs are simply being delayed from being sent due to some issue at PayPal's end; we would recommend contacting PayPal support to report the problem and see if there's any ETA on a fix.



Although PayPal has not (yet) posted any notice acknowledging a current problem with IPNs, we've been getting a few other reports of sporadic delays in IPN, which seems to be confirmed by the stats posted on this independent IPN-monitoring site:

2http://paymentreviews.com/ipnoutage.php2



EDIT: Hm, it seems you're certainly not the only one having problems with sporadically delayed IPNs at the moment:

http://developer.paypal-portal.com/pdn/board/message?board.id=ipn&thread.id=18869

You may wish to consider adding integration with one of the other payment processors we support:

http://www.e-junkie.com/ej/help.payment.processors.htm

You might wish to consider getting a merchant account at your bank which would allow you to take card payments directly without going through a "middleman" like PayPal or Google Checkout (where the buyer actually pays the middleman who then pays you), then you could use Authorize.Net as your "merchant gateway", which is the online equivalent of an in-store card-swipe/keypad authorization terminal, and that allows us to process the sale and even auto-redirect buyers directly to their thank-you/download page instantly after checkout.



PayPal's Website Payments Pro service also combines the functions of a merchant account and gateway along with a regular PayPal account-based payment option (here called PayPal Express Checkout) integrated into a single solution. However, since some buyers may still choose to checkout with their PayPal account instead of using a card, you could still run into the occasional delayed-IPN issue with those checkouts, but direct card payments using PayPal Pro would also, as with Authorize.Net, allow us to auto-redirect buyers and process the sale immediately after checkout.

BTW, there's still no "official" Live Site Status post from PayPal confirming an issue, but apparently PayPal has discovered and rolled out a fix for something that was causing a backlog of tardy IPNs, so they should now be catching up with the backlog, at least according to what was posted most recently to that PayPal Developer Network forum thread I'd referenced previously:

1http://developer.paypal-portal.com/pdn/board/message?board.id=ipn&thread.id=18869&page=21

I have been having PayPal problems for 12 days. At first the notifications didn't go through at all, then they were a day late, and now they are half an hour late. I've spent humungous amounts of time responding to emails and phone calls and hand sending the downloads. I just spent OVER HALF AN HOUR ON HOLD at PayPal and got nowhere.



I am getting my notifications from PP just fine, and I get my money just fine. I have been doing so for a year. Now, all of a sudden there are huge issues. Yes, it may be PP's issues, but from my perspective, PP is notifying me and paying me. EJ is not providing the download for my client. I use PP because it is convenient for my clients. EJ said they are integrated with PP, and that is what I expect. I should not have to "switch" systems because EJ can't integrate with PP.



Sorry, but I need to vent about this. It has been too much for too long and too many fingers pointing elsewhere.

I understand your frustration and can even relate to it personally, as we get a flood of complaints every time PayPal starts dropping the ball again.



E-junkie is just as closely integrated with PayPal as they provide the technological means to be, which means that we depend upon PayPal to transmit their IPN (Instant Payment Notification) to our server in timely fashion after each order's payment is completed. This notification is a back-end data transmission from their servers to ours and is completely separate and unrelated to the payment-receipt email they send to you and the buyer.



Unfortunately, these IPNs are occasionally far less than "instant", and if some technical glitch at PayPal's end causes them to start delaying or even dropping the IPNs they should be sending to us, there is nothing we can do to fulfill a sale that PayPal has not even informed us exists yet. If you are fulfilling sales manually and wish to prevent our system from also fulfilling the orders again later once the IPN finally comes through, you can enter those transaction IDs in your Seller Admin > Block Transactions.



You might be interested in this forum post where I described how the whole process works in real-world layman's terms more analogous to old-fashioned pre-Internet mailorder fulfillment, just to get a clearer picture of how the whole process works:

http://www.e-junkie.com/bb/topic/2702#post7080



You may also wish to consider integrating one of the other online payment processors we support:

1http://www.e-junkie.com/ej/help.payment.processors.htm1

I am STILL having PayPal problems. After submitting the question to PP for the third time, I got this response:



[begin message]



After looking further into your account I see you have IPN turned on but the URL you inserted is not valid. The url is were we will send notification to. Contact your cart provider for the correct IPN URL currently you have http://www.businessplangateway.com/ipnpay_pal.php



to change this URL to the correct one follow these steps



1. Go to the PayPal website and log in to your account.

2. Click "Profile" at the top of the page.

3. Click the "Instant Payment Notification Preferences" link in the Selling Preferences column.

4. Click "Edit."

5. Check the checkbox and enter the URL to which you would like to receive HTML posts.

6. Click "Save."



[end of message]



My question now is: What do I put for #5?



My second question: Why is this happening after a year of smooth operation?

You should not need to manually configure PayPal IPN with E-junkie, as our purchase buttons automatically send our IPN specs to PayPal for each and every sale. You might want to disable your IPN settings and remove that URL anyway, although our auto-sent IPN specs are supposed to override those.



Assuming at least some of your orders are getting processed while others are being delayed, then the entire problem is that PayPal occasionally has technical issues at their end that can create a backlog of delayed (or, rarely, even dropped) IPNs. Please see some troubleshooting tips here:

1http://www.e-junkie.com/ej/trouble.paypal.completed-order-not-processed.htm1

I sent your message to PayPal, and got this back:



[begin message]



Hi,



Currently there's no back logging issue. The problem my be in the script itself. Can you request a copy of the header from your IPN script? I had a contact the other day that was experiencing long IPN delays. He corrected the problem by changing the status 200 in his header to



header("Connection: close");

header("HTTP/1.1 200 OK");



[end message]



That is absolute gobbledegook to me. Does it mean anything to you? If so, what so I do now?

All of PayPal's replies seem to presume they think you're programming some custom IPN-handling script of your own from scratch, rather than using E-junkie's ready-made solution. At any rate, the information they provided isn't relevant to us, nor is it anything you should need to do anything about with when using E-junkie. It's rather strange that you're the only one reporting this problem currently, so let's try and narrow down what your exact symptoms are with some troubleshooting questions:



- Are you still, currently experiencing delays between when your PayPal history shows a payment with Completed status vs. when E-junkie processes the sale?



If not anymore, then PayPal has apparently corrected by now whatever was causing delays at their end.



If you are still seeing significant delays:



- Are any of your PayPal sales being processed in a timely fashion, or are all of them being delayed?

- If some are being processed quickly and others delayed, is there any consistent difference you can see to distinguish them, anything in common for the delayed ones?

- Are you needing to do anything manually to accept payments in order for those sales to then be processed?

- For the sales that are delayed after the payment status shows as Completed in PayPal, what do you find for those payments in your PayPal account when you go to My Account > History > IPN History?