PayPal IPN questions....

[goaskmom]

Yes, more PayPal questions. Seems to be the topic this week, so who am I to change the course of discussion?

I've having ocassional paypal problems, where I get an email from my store email asking me if I am testing PayPal since there was an error. Weird email, and it's from me! I contributed it to someone not completing their transaction, but who knows? (obviously not me)

Anywhoooo, the question I have is my first couple of orders are listed in the PayPal IPN section and say "web_assist" and the rest of the orders after that all say "cart".

What's the difference? Is there any good place to read up on the PayPal IPN mod?

Many thanks. May all your children be born naked.

[goaskmom]

This is the content of the 2 emails I get from time to time. They come in sets, both of them come and I just got 2 this morning.

One email :

Connection Type
------------------------------------------------------
curl= 1, socket= , domain= www.paypal.com, port=

PayPal Response
------------------------------------------------------




PayPal - Welcome

Second email :

An unknown transaction () occurred from 216.113.188.202
Are you running any tests?

Any idea on what causes this, how to fix it, or how to start troubleshooting it?

Thanks-

[ganast]

This is an interesting question, however, you might try here: PayPal IPN, specifically here.

-gabe

[goaskmom]

Thanks, I just found the paypal IPN site on the actual PayPal site and it had a couple of things that were good info.

What I found about my situation were several things- first, the resources I found were that the web_accept and cart are linked to the transaction type which are defined by PayPal as (all from the PayPal website):

txn_type

"cart" This payment was sent by your customer via the PayPal Shopping Cart feature.

"send_money" This payment was sent by your customer from the PayPal website, using the "Send Money" tab.

"web_accept" The payment was sent by your customer via Buy Now Buttons, Donations, or Auction Smart Logos.


I have no idea where the "web_accept" came from, since I have no donation or auction services on the site and the "buy now" is not a PayPal "buy now" button.

I did find this site which is most helpful. Seems the whole PayPal IPN goes down from time to time.

http://www.paypaldev.org/default.asp

I noticed I was not a "business" member of PayPal, and I saw a brief blurb that said something like "Accept credit cards". I thought I could already do that with my account. So, I joined as a business member, and then tried to find that page again, and I couldn't. So, my only guess at this point is that the failures have been people trying to buy without an account using their credit cards and it would just crash on them, more or less, since I wasn't setup with the proper level of account with PayPal.

But, that's only a guess.