Hello and welcome to Digital Access Pass. My name is Veena Prashant. In this video, I'll take you behind the scenes to show you some easy ways to troubleshoot PayPal IPN issues.
Now PayPal uses Instant Payment Notification, known as IPN, to notify third-party systems of events such as cancellation, refunds, subscription payment. Now this notification is critical for subscription management. So if you run a membership site and you use a membership plugin such as Dapp, what happens is PayPal sends a notification in. whenever a subscription payment goes through successfully in PayPal.
And Dapp uses the notification to automatically extend users'access to that subscription product. So the whole access management is based on, it relies on, notification from PayPal. So if this notification is not working right, users might lose access to a product or a service even though the payment goes through successfully in PayPal.
Now PayPal does not make it easy to troubleshoot IPN issues. So in this video, I'll show you some easy ways to troubleshoot paypal ipn issues so log into your paypal account and then click on account settings it will bring you to a page like this click on notifications and then you will see there is instant payment notifications this is what we need click on update it will bring you to a page like this make sure that notification url is set correctly in case of dap it needs to point to this script if your site is running on https make sure that you're using https in the url and receive ipn messages make sure this is the one that you have selected here otherwise PayPal will not send IPN messages. Now if you have said this correctly but having IPN issues where the notification is not even getting sent by PayPal or it's getting sent but not getting processed by Dapp, there are a few things you can do to figure out the cause of this problem.
Now you can see here there is this link to IPN history page. This is again on the same page towards the top you will see there is this link here. This is such a useful tool.
I'm not sure why PayPal does not make it more obvious and maybe add a button to it somewhere. so people can see it most people don't even know it exists because it's just hiding here but if you go to this page it will definitely help you uh troubleshoot ipn issues i'm going to click on this so this is ipn history page here you can select the date range paypal will let you go back up to 28 days so any problems you have had in the last 28 days you can troubleshoot it here select the right date range and then here you will find a list of all the notifications that paypal sent and you will see the status as well it will tell you if it was sent successfully or it failed here you can see this one says retrying so this one failed for some reason and it's still retrying it didn't make it successfully so if you know the transaction id of the transaction that didn't make it you can enter that here and search for it and then you can check what the status is so there are two types of problems one is paypal is not even sending the notification right so in that case you will not find anything So if your IPN URL is set correctly, but there is nothing here, then you can talk to PayPal and find out why PayPal is not even sending it. Right. So that's a rare case. But if you don't even see anything here, even though your URL is set correctly in the IPN page, you will have to talk to PayPal support and see why they are not sending a notification.
But if you see the notification here, the notifications are getting sent, but it's not getting processed by DAP. It could be because, number one. There is a problem at server level. So your server is rejecting the messages from PayPal. So this retry could be because your server is not even accepting the message from PayPal.
So it's not even reaching Dapp. Or it could be because your server is receiving the message. Dapp is getting the message, but it's failing somewhere. It's not able to complete the processing. So even though the status says sent, say that there was a problem and the user's access was not extended in Dapp, even though the payment went through successfully.
so what you can do is click on the message id number right here it will bring you to a page like this where you will find all the message details it will show you the notification url so what this means is the script to which the notification was sent so first thing you need to do is check if this url is correct so if this is correct this is the right script to which the notification should be sent and the status says send you will find all the details about the message right here so this is the message that was sent by paypal in the ipn next thing you can do is go to dap and see what happened so this is the dap payment orders page here you will find all the payment orders that was processed by dap during a specific date range you can select the date range right here so say that you had a problem between this date range select the date range it will show you all the transactions that dap received all the ipn messages that dap received in that date range then you can check the status field If it says success, it means everything worked right. Dapp would have extended the user's access to the product. If it says processed affiliation successfully, it also means success, and Dapp would have extended the access in this case as well. But if it says new, for example, here you can see it says new.
If the status is set to new, what this means is Dapp received the notification from PayPal, and when Dapp sent a request back to PayPal to make sure that the notification, in fact, came from PayPal. So that's the verification check. That DAP does to make sure that notification is in fact coming from PayPal. So this can happen if there is a communication issue between your server and PayPal. There are a couple of things you can do when this happens.
You can click on this edit icon right here to edit this transaction. And it will bring you to the edit transaction page. Just click on update and it will change the status from new to success. And it will automatically extend user's access. This is not going to fix the actual problem, which is The next time it comes in for a different request, you don't want the status to be new.
So the next thing you need to do is go to Setup Config Page, click on Payment Processing. Here under the PayPal tab, make sure that the communication protocol is set to F Open. So if it is set to F Open and you're having this issue, you can switch it to curl and see if it helps.
Otherwise, if it is set to this by default and you're having problems like this, just switch it to F Open and then check for the next few days if the problem gets resolved. And one more thing you can do is this is the PayPal IPN page. If a specific transaction didn't make it to DAP, you can just select it and see this there is a resend button here.
You can click on it to resend that IPN notification to your server and then you can go back to the DAP orders page and see if the notification made it to DAP and if the status is set to success. So these are some easy ways for you to troubleshoot PayPal IPN issues. IPN history page is a really helpful tool.
that will tell you what's happening is paypal sending it paypal is not even sending it there might be a problem with the url that you have set there might be a problem with your setting in paypal so you can talk to paypal support if paypal is sending but it's not connecting with dap for some reason try to change the notification protocol in the setup config page change it from f open to curl or if it's already set to curl then change it to f open see if that helps and check the status of the notifications if there is a problem users access didn't get extended go to the orders page select the right date range and see if the status says success or processed affiliations if it does it's fine if it says new then you can click on this edit button here just click on update once so it can extend the access so this you can do manually for transactions that were stuck with a new status and if you want to resend a notification from paypal You can go to the IP and history page, select the transaction that you want to resend and click on the resend button. And also, if there is a transaction here that's stuck with a new status, you can get the transaction ID from here. You can enter the transaction ID here, click on search.
It will bring up details about that transaction. And then you can click on the message ID to see all the details about that message. And if you tried all of this and it's still not working, just open a support ticket with us and we'll take a look. I hope this was helpful.
My name is Veena Prashant. Thank you so much for watching. Bye for now.