Quite often (at least several time a week) I am not getting my IPN from PayPal in a timely fashion. It may take an hour or more for PayPal to post back to my server. Normally it is just a couple of seconds when things are working right.
Everytime I ask PayPal, they say there no problem with the system. I sell an online course, and users expect to begin as soon as they pay - this is really hurting my business.
Is anybody else using IPN, and are you having problems like this?
I see a lot of paypal IPN data come in for my varrious clients and generally it is fast but not always. The problems that I have narrowed this down to are either paypal being slow (it’s possible that during high loads they don’t send out this information as quickly or just take longer to validate) or more likely, slow authorization. Not all payment methods are instant, it could just be that someone is sending funds from their bank or something else that is causing paypal to wait around to send out verrification. Of course you would think an immediate response would be sent that simply didn’t process the order as sucess but they may just wait for validation of the funds to avoid sending out a false-negative or a seemingly denied message anyways? That’s just my theory mind you…
Hi,
Even I have the same problem. But I don’t get the Paypal Variables for some orders. Its empty.But they have actually made a payment. So I have to manually look up in the Paypal account to see if a payment came through.
Many Times in the week I have some orders like this which have the Invalid Response. But the Payments were made.
Please let me know if there is a Solution for this.
You should keep an eye on the Paypal developer forums as there’s been a lot of issues with IPN over the past few weeks. Paypal (as usual) insist its fixed, then it all goes wrong again. Real amateur set up over there.
We only offer Paypal as a secondary payment option, but we’re edging towards dropping it as IPN is too flakey - can sometimes take days for an IPN to be sent back (if at all). And that Friday morning maintenance shut down is atrotious - I believe occurs at night in America, but it occurs at 10am in the UK.