Paypal Content Subscription IPN

[Jamesbuk]

Hey guys and girls,

I run a website where users sign up, pay via paypal and get access to a large amount of content. As I'm sure you can imagine, its quite a pain in the arse to have to manually activate each person when they pay!

I heard of something called Paypal IPN, Instant Payment Notification. Supposedly when someone pays, it will run a page on my site which will automatically update their payment status.

Only problem is, paypals explanation of it is sketchy at best so I have no idea how to implement it! Ive searched for hours on google looking for code snippets so I can get it to work but no luck so far!

Does anyone else run a similar system and understands how it works and could help?

Thanks,

James

 

[rsloman]

Lookup callback notification in the paypal developers documentation in their site. I use it for processing payments for orders on my site and so far no problems.

 

[Jamesbuk]

Hey,

Thanks, I found this code Here on their website. From looking at it, thats post payment right?

So what would I do.. have a normal button that has the "page to return after purchase" pointed to the page with the script on?

Thanks,

James

 

[rsloman]

Don't know, I don't use PHP.

What you need is a form containing all the necessary variables that is submitted by the user, which then takes them to paypal to enter their details. When this is complete, paypals servers call a script/page on your website that you can use to automate emails etc.

Don't rely on the user returning to your site after paying, doesn't always happen.

 

[MattBristow]

As said above your 'check out page' sends the various variables to paypal via a form post i.e. address details, cost details, delivery overall price etc etc etc thereis also a pass through variable that just get returned back to you I have used this to identify certain things the IPN then automatically sends its own post to a 'hidden' page on your website this page depending on the response from PP can then trigger auto emails from you and update database fields no problem.

A couple of words of advice though use the free sandbox setup and test your code to distraction before making it live also remember its not instant as it claims I have had instances of the post back taking upto 3 hours!!

Any other pointers happy to help just ask