IPN

Introduction | Settings | Troubleshooting

Introduction

IPN (Instant Payment Notification) is a feature that most payment-providers support. It means that info about the sale is sent to a script on your server immediately when the sale completes. This allows O3 to insert the sale, add the user to the database, then send a confirmation email to the customer. There are separate IPN scripts for each payment processor which supports IPN - because they all use different formats.

For details on the confirmation emails that are sent out, see the Confirmation Emails page.

You must enable IPN for your payment provider - usually done through your account settings. Some require extra things set up - i.e. StartmPay has a secret code you define in your account which is sent with the IPN. The IPN-Stormpay script the checks this valus is correct as an additional security measure.

Settings

There are some options in the settings which affect the IPN scripts' behaviour. Youll find them under the 'General ECommerce' and 'Email' settings:

• First and foremost is the IPN Notification URL - i.e. the location of the script. If this isn't set correctly the script won't be run & sales won't be recorded.
  
  
• The Logging Settings define whether the IPN scripts write a log. It's advisable to enable this. On by default.
• Confirm 2 Webmaster defines whether you get a copy of the confirmation email which is sent to customers. It's ON by default.
• Cancel Now will automatically cancel subscriptions when a cancellation notice is received. Otherwise the membership stays valid. ON by default.
• Email Settings. These define the subject and body of emails sent out by the IPN scripts.

Troubleshooting

For IPN to work you must ensure your settings are correct. First: If the IPN URL is wrong the script won't get the data.

It's advisable to enable writing to a log file, as described in the installation instructions. If you have any problems with orders not being logged etc. this is the first place to look!

If no log file is produced, check the permissions on the log directory are correct, allowing anyone to write to the directory. The IPN scripts generate plenty of debug info anyway - so you can often just run them to see what's going on.

You can run the ipn script directly, and hence see it's output, by:

• Typing it's url into a browser.
• Creating a test IPN form - you can use the ones in the carts.php page from the demo website as an example.

O3's IPN script can log all IPNs to a database table. This ensures no data is lost, even if the log file can't be written for whatever reason. This table may become quite large over time, so it's advisable to empty the table occasionally if you get loads of sales, using your database admin tool (i.e. phpMyAdmin)