IPN stands for Instant Payment Notification and in short it is needed for Event Espresso to be notified about the transaction in order to complete the registration on the website.
When setting up PayPal to work with Event Espresso you need to change the settings in the Plugin and in your PayPal account.
If your IPN is set up and you require some troubleshooting tips, please click here.
Plugin Settings
There are two types of settings, testing (also known as Sandbox or Debugging) and live.
With the testing settings you will first need to have a PayPal Sandbox account and enter your merchant email address in the PayPal ID option and make sure that the Use the Debugging Feature and the PayPal Sandbox option is ticked.
Any registrations taking place will now head to the Sandbox where no actual money changes hands. You will need to use a Sandbox buyer account details to make a purchase.
For live settings, add your own PayPal email address to the PayPal ID option and make sure that the Debugging Feature and the PayPal Sandbox option is turned off.
Please only enable the “Force HTTPS on Return URL” feature if you have an SSL certificate installed for your domain. In most cases, you can order an SSL certificate from your hosting provider.
PayPal Settings
To set up your account to use IPN, log into your PayPal account and click the Profile link in the menu bar.
Click the My Selling Tools option in the left hand menu and then click the update next to Instant Payment Notifications.
On the next screen click the Choose IPN Settings button at the bottom of the page.
On the next page add the url to your Event Espresso notifications page, by default it will be http://www.yoursitename.com/transactions/
Make sure “Receive IPN messages (Enabled)” is enabled and click save.
Server Firewall Settings
If necessary, add PayPal’s IP addresses to any list of trusted IP addresses needed by your firewall or other network devices. Here is the current list of PayPal IP addresses.
Troubleshooting PayPal IPN
Make sure your PayPal account is verified.
Make sure that the 4 required pages in the Event Espresso General Settings are correct and have the correct shortcodes in them.
Make sure that the 4 required pages in the Event Espresso General Settings are publicly viewable and not set to private, draft or password protected.
Make sure there are no ‘maintenance mode’ type plugins active.
Please only enable the “Force HTTPS on Return URL” feature if you have an SSL certificate installed for your domain. In most cases, you can order an SSL certificate from your hosting provider.
If you are running the Bad Behavior plugin, you will need to whitelist the IP addresses of PayPal servers, and keep an eye on the Bad Behavior logs to stay up to date in case PayPal gateway adds or changes the IP addresses they use to notify your site.
If you are experiencing problems with incomplete payments, try the Simplified Transaction template. This can be added to your theme and activated on the Transactions page via the Page Attributes option. See this forum thread.
Check to see if you have outdated or incorrectly modified gateway files in wp-content/uploads/espresso/gateways directory. If so, temporarily rename that directory to force Event Espresso to use the default gateway files.
You can check the IPN log file for errors. The IPN log file is located on your server in the /wp-content/uploads/espresso/logs directory. You can FTP in or view the file using your host’s c-panel file manager.
Incomplete Payment Issues
If you are experiencing problems with incomplete payments, most often it has to do with problems reaching your Transactions page ([ESPRESSO_TXN_PAGE]) from the payment gateway.
You can download our special stripped down Transactions page template in the link below. Included in the zip file is a quick readme with installation instructions.
It is recommended that you try this template after verifying that IPN is turned on, your account is verified, you have a standard or business account (if using PayPal) and — most importantly — that your Transactions page is visible to the internet.
If you have confirmed these four things and you are still having issues with incomplete payments, you can try the download below.