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Instant Payment Notification Manual

Testing IPN

You should always test your IPN implementation with the live PayPal system. Here’s an

easy way to do it:

1. Sign up for a Personal PayPal account if you don’t already have one, and add a

credit card to the account. This will be your “buyer” account.

Note: According to the PayPal User Agreement, you may have one Personal

and one Premier/Business account. Please do not set up any additional

PayPal accounts, as this may result in your account access being limited.

2. Make sure that your Business/Premier account is Verified. This is the account

which uses IPN, your “seller” account.

3. Log in to your buyer account and send money to your seller account, as if you

were making a regular payment. You can send a very small amount, such as

$0.01.

4. Check the results of your IPN test.

5. Log in to your seller account and refund the payment. To refund a payment, go

to the Transaction Details page and click the Refund Payment link at the

bottom. The refund reverses the entire payment, including transaction fees.

Remember that you only have 30 days to refund the payment.

This testing method is free of charge and lets you complete the entire process

yourself. If you would prefer not to open a second PayPal account, you can also have

friends or trusted clients send you test payments, which you can then refund.

Testing tip 1: PayPal recommends you start with one of PayPal’s code samples

available at https://www.paypal.com/ipn under the Code Samples section. There are

code samples for the following development environments.

• ASP/VBScript

• ColdFusion

• Java/JSP

• PERL

• PHP