Overview
You might find that some PayPal transactions that take place outside of Kindful are not captured by the PayPal Instant Payment Notification (IPN) service and brought into Kindful. This article goes over reasons for this, how to find these transactions, and how you can attempt to re-send them into Kindful.
Linked Articles:
- Connect PayPal as a Payment Gateway
The PayPal Connection
When you connect your PayPal account to Kindful, in the Payment Gateways page of your Fundraising Settings > Transaction Settings, you will have access to your Kindful IPN. From https://developer.paypal.com/api/nvp-soap/ipn:
The "Instant Payment Notification (IPN) is a message service that automatically notifies merchants of events related to PayPal transactions. Merchants can use it to automate back-office and administrative functions, including automatically fulfilling orders and providing customers with order status."
In our case, Kindful is the recipient of this notification. Kindful will receive the donor name, donor contact information, and the relevant donation information (amount and date).
To set up Instant Payment Notification:
- In Kindful, click Settings > Fundraising Settings > Payment Gateways.
- On the PayPal tile, click Settings.
- Copy the URL.
- Go to PayPal.com.
- Create a new PayPal account or sign in to an existing account.
- From your profile, click Account Settings.
- Click Notifications.
- Next to Instant Payment Notifications, click Update.
- Click Choose IPN Settings.
- In the Notification URL text box, paste the URL that you copied from Kindful.
- Select Receive IPN messages.
- Click Save.
Doing these steps ensures that all eligible PayPal transactions make their way into your Kindful account.
Transactions Are Taking Place in PayPal, But Not Coming Into Kindful
If you see successful transactions in PayPal, but they do not sync to Kindful, verify in PayPal where these transactions are pointing. Make sure the IPN URL in Kindful and PayPal is the same.
Follow the instructions in the PayPal documentation at https://developer.paypal.com/api/nvp-soap/ipn/IPNOperations/.
Resending the PayPal IPN Messages to Kindful
Use the IPN History page to request that PayPal resend one or more IPN messages. You can search the IPN message history for the messages that may need to be resent, and then select them.
To resend IPN messages:
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Mark one or more messages and click the Resend selected button.
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To send the message to the Kindful profile URL instead of the URL associated with the message, check the box for To send an IPN again to a profile URL (located just below the Resent Selected button). If you do not select this option, PayPal sends the message to the same URL to which the original message was sent, which is not necessarily the current profile URL.
You may receive a confirmation notice alerting you to the possibility that you will receive duplicate messages. Click Confirm to resend; otherwise click Cancel.
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Check the status for resent messages. The status indicates that PayPal is resending the message until it actually has been resent.
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Check for the transaction inside of Kindful.
Will All Transactions Sync into Kindful?
When donations are made via PayPal such as a one time transaction, and the Notification URL is pointing to Kindful, the transactions should sync into Kindful. Recurring transactions can sync into Kindful as well, as long as the Notification URL is pointing to Kindful. This happens most commonly when a recurring transaction is initiated from a Kindful donation page, and PayPal is used to process the recurring donation.
If you have recurring donations that are created directly from PayPal (oftentimes from a form on your website), then the Notification URL will be pointing to your website. In this case, the Notification URL would look like it does in the image below (and not the Kindful URL):
In this case, when the recurrence is set up from your site, and the Notification URL is pointing to your site, it will be locked to that destination, and the previous steps will not work to change where it is pointing. This is the one exception to this work-flow.
Recurring donations processing in PayPal, but not appearing in Kindful, will need to be re-setup in Kindful and cancelled in PayPal.
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