paypal custom confirmation email

Question

I am working on my first Paypal site. I have a form on the site that the customer fills out with custom information. I want to take that information the user fills out and have it send a message to my email along with the payment confirmation that Paypal sends. Any Idea on how to do this? I'm using Angular and Ajax for the front-end and php for the email service. Thanks

Answer 1

What you want is Instant Payment Notification (IPN) . It will automatically POST data about any transaction that hits your PayPal account (ie. sales, refunds, disputes, etc.) to a URL that you specify so that you can receive that data and process it accordingly.

Within your IPN script you can update your database, generate email notifications, hit 3rd party web services, etc.

It's a very powerful tool for automating lots of post-transaction processing tasks.

Answer 2

While demanding a custom email to you as the payment receiver, what you didn't mention is the business needs behind it, or put it in other words, what you are planning to do with the custom email.

(I think this topic could turn into a big essay... My conclusion is I'd recommend IPN or EC with IPN . But below is what was on my mind when I got the conclusion.)

The emails to receiver can be used as a primitive way to notify sellers about payments they received or other transaction events. However this requires either a person's manual work to check the emails, or a program to parse the emails and get info out of the emails. Manual work is error prone and once your business grows bigger the number of emails will be overwhelming. A program to parse the emails costs a lot to develop, is unreliable because emails by nature may be delayed (applies to the manual way above too), and as PayPal doesn't consider emails as the preferred way of notification, sellers shouldn't either - maybe the content / format may change. PayPal provides a few better ways, I'll mention later.

Thus, if you want to start small, checking your emails manually could work for a while, until it becomes overwhelming. Unfortunately this email from PayPal isn't customizable.

So here are the ways I know, starting from manual to automated:

1. Downloaded transaction log from your PayPal profile. This works best if you don't have to check transactions very often. If you only check transactions daily, weekly or even monthly, this works. My nonsense thinking is, it would work if someone really wants to check transactions every minute... but this is really funny.
2. Transaction detail report. This works only if you have a business account. It's generated daily and you have to download through sFTP. It's mainly used for end-of-day transaction checking. This can also be automated.
3. Instant payment notification (IPN). Sent automatically once a payment is made or transaction status changes. You need a script at an accessible URL to listen to this notification, and this script should process the IPN once it arrives, for example updating your order status. https://developer.paypal.com/webapps/developer/docs/classic/ipn/integration-guide/IPNIntro/
4. EC with IPN. If you use Express Checkout (EC) to receive payments, EC returns transaction status immediately with the response of your API call. But, you still need IPN because there are cases which are not triggered by API calls. This is a big topic so please check below page: https://developer.paypal.com/webapps/developer/docs/classic/products/express-checkout/
5. For other products, similar to #3 and #4 above.

All points above can be explained in a loooong article, or many loooong articles. I'm just too lazy to explain them here.

So conclusion again, do try #3 IPN or #4 EC with IPN.

And, all those ways above may be very confusing for people who just came into this topic. If you write down your business needs instead of demanding the email, people may be able to help in a more specific way.