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@cogginsalan: Does anyone have experience with the PayPal IPN process? I’m trying to sort out a client with a membership subscription site and about 400 members who are paying annually. We are looking to drop their existing membership plugin and this means that the current IPN url will start to fail. PayPal tells me there is no way to edit an IPN url - in fact when I took over their site I switched to https and this made the renewals fail because it is seen as a different address, so we had to change back. The current IPN url is of the form: http://www.site.com.au/?it_exchange_paypal-standard-secure=1 . What I want to know is if there is some way to set up something that will just return a “success” message back to PayPal so it will go ahead and process the recurring payment. That way we can keep the current members without them having to resubscribe. I’d appreciate any suggestions.
@slack1891: I’m able to change my IPN address…
See if this document helps you…
https://www.paypal.com/us/smarthelp/article/how-do-i-specify-the-url-for-my-ipn-script-faq3662
Following the steps there brings me to the page where I can edit my IPN address
@cogginsalan: Yep. That’s for setting up a new IPN url. It is impossible to change an existing one that is already in the system.
@slack1891:
I can edit mine…
@cogginsalan: Paypal support have told me this. Can’t be done. They have to re-subscribe.
@slack1891: What a PITA.
@cogginsalan: When I changed the site to https I edited the value on that page. That was fine for new subscriptions. Old ones started failing. Yes… PITA.
@slack1891: Ah, I see what you’re saying… the previous transactions were inextricably tied to the original URL.
@cogginsalan: Yep.
It even sees www and non-www as different and will fail.
@slack1891: Maybe offering a free month of service for re-subs… to ease their pain.
Google is the same. a www version and non-www version of the same domain is two different properties…and if there’s http and https…that’s a total of 4 properties.
(which convolutes search data)
@cogginsalan: I always find Paypal to be incredibly confusing. Instant headache for me.
@slack1891: You are not alone. It’s all the payment processors that have kept me from working on an ecommerce solution.
PayPal be all like: Sign up, upgrade to Premiere, verify account, reg as dev, login to dev, here’s a sandbox, sign up for your tokens by following these 12 guides.
Me: Where am I?
@cogginsalan: I was just wondering if it might be possible to set up a simple IPN listener that just returns “verified” so the renewal could proceed. https://developer.paypal.com/docs/classic/ipn/integration-guide/IPNImplementation/
@slack1891: Anything’s possible.
Sorry I can’t be of more help on it… I don’t dare open the API docs with the number of tasks on my plate
Maybe post on the forum to get some more visibility on it. This channel’s only got 30 members
@cogginsalan: No, that’s fine. I was hoping there might be a PayPal guru lurking. Will post on the forum as you suggest. Cheers.
@laurence: Stackoverflow?
@slack1891: My self-esteem is too fragile for SO. :rolling_on_the_floor_laughing:
@thoriqoe: @thoriqoe has joined the channel
@wade: @cogginsalan https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11454900/change-the-ipn-url-on-existing-subscription
Not that this is helpful now, but I stopped using PayPal a long time ago - now I only integrate Stripe
@tim.kaye: I have taken the same approach as @wade. But it’s probably only viable if all the customers will be in the UK or North America. It certainly won’t be viable for continental Europe, for example.
@cogginsalan: Thanks Wade. I remember reading that a while ago when we had the http/https problem and I suggested setting up a 307 redirect. But, in the end, they decided to just stay with http. I’ll look into that avenue again, but I’m doubtful I can assign the old customers some new address that would work in a new plugin. It’s quite a mess. Probably getting them all to re-subscribe is the easiest option.