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8 PayPal Instant Notification (IPN)

PayPal offers a feature called the Instant Payment Notification (IPN) that enables its Business and Premier account holders to automatically process orders once PayPal has posted a successful payment. The IPN is the process where PayPal sends an automated message to another server once the buyer has successfully completed his payment on PayPal’s shopping cart. PayPal account holders have the option to direct the success message to a server of his choice.

The STRONGVON server was designed to comply with the IPN protocol on the PayPal servers. Thus, your pending registrations on the STRONGVON server can be automatically approved using the IPN. After PayPal flags a payment as successfully paid on its server, the IPN can be sent to the STRONGVON server within minutes.

To enable the IPN feature on your Business or Premier account:

1. 1. Log into your PayPal account at www.paypal.com.
2. 2. Click on “Profile” within the “My Account” tab, shown in Figure 9.
3. 3. Click on the “Instant Payment Notification” link under Selling Preferences.
4. 4. Click on the “Edit IPN Settings” as shown in Figure 10.
5. 5. Enter “http://strongvon.com/paypalipn” for the “Notification URL” field, as shown in Figure 11.
6. 6. Select the radio button labeled “Receive IPN messages (Enabled)”.
7. 7. Click on the Save button to save the new IPN settings. Your IPN configuration should look similar to Figure 12.

Figure 9. Accessing IPN Settings from Profile Summary on PayPal

Figure 10. Edit IPN Settings on PayPal

Figure 11. Entering Notification URL for IPN

Figure 12. Completed IPN Settings on PayPal