PayPal IPN Not Marking Invoices Paid

[Liam]

Hello everyone, 

I am getting payments using PayPal through WHMCS. I integrated it through WHMCS from pressing configure and logging into my paypal account and the ID and secret was automatically filled in. 

The payments come through fine. The first payment goes from Unpaid to payment pending (even though the money is cleared in PP). The second payment that has a subscription ID, is left as unpaid.

I have checked the IPN setting, and it is set to my site URL https://X.com/ <in that exact format, and has been from the start. I've also tried without the trailing slash.

In IPN history, they are being sent and getting a 200 code. 

So I'm baffled, does anyone have an idea what the problem could be? 

[WHMCS Alex]

Hello @Liam,

A client ID and Secret are used by the PayPal Checkout module, which utilises webhooks for payment notifications, not the IPN (which the PayPal Basic module uses).

To that end, you will want to check the webhook events history inside PayPal to determine why no notification of payment was sent: https://developer.paypal.com/developer/dashboard/webhooks/live

WHMCS configures the relevant webhook listener and events for payment/subscriptions upon connecting to PayPal, from WHMCS. 

You will also want to check your Gateway Log inside WHMCS for any errors if payment notifications/webhooks are being received but the payment is failing to record, with common issue explained here: https://docs.whmcs.com/PayPal_Checkout#Common_Problems

[niels]

I have the same issue, using WHMCS 8.10 and PayPal Checkout.

In https://developer.paypal.com/developer/dashboard/webhooks/live there are no webhooks listed for the WHMCS app. But in the old IPN history I do see PayPal posting the PayPal Checkout payments to the URL I configured for IPN's - exactly like @Liam.

Either the WHMCS PayPal Checkout module is not properly passing the relevant webhook, or PayPal decides that the IPN overrules any such webhook.

There are no errors in any of the logs. Everything looks fine. It's just that PayPal uses an IPN instead of a webhook for some reason.

@Liam, did you end up solving this one?

[niels]

I decided to unlink and re-link PayPal to see if that would create the missing webhook. But it doesn't. All it does is create a PayPal nightmare because 99 out of a 100 times the linking procedure just opens the PayPal Dashboard and PayPal starts throwing captcha's at you when you login in that many times.

I then decided to manually create a webhook and point it at the paypalwebhooks.php file. This gets the webhooks going, but of course WHMCS rejects the signature.

Somewhere in WHMCS I need to store the Webhook ID, but I cannot figure out where to do this.

Rather frustratingly (sadistically?) WHMCS shows various fields when configure the PayPal Checkout module, but they're all read-only and the one for a Webhook ID is missing entirely. Any ideas where to store this?

[niels]

Alright. "Fixed" it. Here's the secret sauce: visit paypal.com and delete all cookies after each try. That improves linking odds from 1 in 100 to 100 in 100. It did not guarantee the webhook creation, but made retrying a lot less frustrating and after a few retries the webhook was properly created.

Still wish WHMCS would just allow for us to enter all this stuff manually and document how to do so. Dealing with this, even if it's PayPal's fault, is a waste of time.