Paypal IPN

[Christopher Short]

Is there a way to have cubecart not reject IPN if there is no order information? I have orders outside of the website so when payment is received it bounces. Paypal keeps turning off the IPN because of this.

[bsmither]

I am not an expert on anything PayPal, but CubeCart accepts an IPN (as best I can see, so far, from the code), period.

I understand that the entity sending the IPN is only expecting a 200 OK server response, and does not care what the contents of that response are.

However, the next step in this handshake, CubeCart's response to the IPN, is for Cubecart to make a Request to that entity echoing the data that was in the IPN, and receiving the resolution of the transaction. There is no initial test to make sure the cart_order_id exists, and if not, do not make the Request.

In admin, Request Log, see if there are any PayPal entries that show an IPN was responded to and that had some kind of issue.

Triggering PayPal with orders external to your store (that is, not initiated by your store) to contact your store with an IPN suggests to me that there is a setting in your PayPal account control panel that says to contact your store regardless. CubeCart includes the URL for PayPal to use to make the contact with its IPN. So, I have to assume you have configured PayPal to ignore that specified URL, and use what is set in the PayPal account settings. I'm guessing about this, of course.

Therefore, if PayPal gets a Request from your store and that Request includes all that PayPal sent in the IPN, no more and no less, I cannot see how this would be a problem.

PayPal's response with the resolution to the transaction finishes the handshaking.

Then, after a successful cURL (the means of the Request) closure, CubeCart begins to deal with the order as given in the 'invoice' data item provided by PayPal - which probably does not exist in your store.