What I’ve been really surprised by over the past few weeks is the number of sites that don’t actually have this turned on and it’s just not limited to self builds even the really expensive Magento builds are missing this out this as a step.

Turning on the PayPal Instant Payment Notification (IPN for short) is an excellent idea as means that when a customer pays for an item using PayPal then the payment information will be updated on the Magento order details in the administration panel.

It only takes a few moments to enable and I’ll show you how to enable IPN for your Magento site below. This will mean that when you receive an order via PayPal Express for example, you can actually see the transaction details in Magento and if you’re using eSellerPro and have the eSellerPro Connector enabled for sales order processing, your order & payment details will match up automatically.

How to Enable PayPal IPN

Setting this up won’t take more than a few moments and here are 6 simple steps to do this:

#1 Login to PayPal

#2 Hover on “Profile” and select “My Selling Preferences”

#3 Half way down the page, click on “Update” next to “Instant payment notifications”

#4 You’ll now be presented with a  page similar to this, press “Choose IPN Settings”

#5 Now enter the following details:

• Notification URL – This is simply http://your-magento-store.com/paypal/ipn/ replacing “your-magento-store.com” with your website address. <= This is the part that normally trips everyone up as they’re not sure what to enter here.
• IPN messages – Set this to “Receive IPN messages (Enabled)”

#6 Press Save

That’s it job done.

Test It’s Working

To test whether IPN is working or not is dead simple, just make a test transaction through your website (you will need a secondary PayPal account for this) and a few minutes later, check on the order in your Magento admin panel has been updated with the PayPal transaction details.

To help you, I have put to images below, the image on the left has no IPN details, the image on the right does.

Paypal IPN Not Working	Paypal IPN Has Worked

If you’re seeing the extra information similar to the right image, congratulations PayPal Instant Payment Notifications are working for you, yay!