Integration Guide
Table Of Contents
- Order Management Integration Guide
- Contents
- Preface
- Introduction
- Payment Data Transfer (PDT)
- Instant Payment Notification (IPN)
- Transaction History and Reporting Tools
- IPN and PDT Variables
- About These Tables of Variables
- test_ipn Variable in Sandbox
- IPN Variables in All Posts
- Buyer Information
- Basic Information
- Advanced and Custom Information
- Website Payments Standard, Website Payments Pro, and Refund Information
- Currency and Currency Exchange
- Auctions
- Mass Payment
- Subscriptions
- Dispute Notification Variables
- PDT-Specific Variables
- Downloadable History Logs
- Index
Order Management Integration Guide March 2008 - first technical draft 25
Instant Payment Notification (IPN)
Setting Up IPN
3
Activating IPN Through Your Account Profile
When you activate IPN through your account profile, the notification URL that you specify is
used for all your IPNs, You can override the value on specific payment transactions by
including notification URLs in the programming code that your website sends to PayPal when
people pay you.
To activate IPN through your account profile:
1. Log in to your Business or Premier account.
2. Click the Profile subtab.
3. In the Selling Preferences column, click the Instant Payment Notification Preferences
link.
4. Click the Edit button.
5. Select the checkbox to activate IPN.
6. In the Notification URL text box, enter the URL of the program that will receive and
process IPNs
7. Click the Save button.
Activating IPN by Including the Notification URL in Programming Code
You can activate IPN for specific payments by including a notification URL in the
programming code that your website sends to PayPal when people pay you. PayPal sends only
IPNs related to payments that result from the code. PayPal sends them to the URL that you
specified in the code.
For example, if you accept payments from different websites through one PayPal account, you
could include different notification URLs in your programming code to let each website
receive IPNs only for its own payments.
N OTE: Notifcation URLs that you include in programming code override the notification URL
that you may have set in your account profile.
To learn how to include notification URLs in programming code:
z See the Name-Value Pair API Developer Guide and Reference
– or –
z See the Website Payments Standard Integration Guide
Setting Up an IPN-Processing Program
The data sent to you by IPN comes as HTML FORM name/value pairs.
Sample code for the following development environments is available on the PayPal website
at
http://www.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=p/pdn/ipn-codesamples-pop-outside:
z ASP.Net/C#
z ASP/VBScript