BILLING.SUBSCRIPTION.CANCELLED does not fire upon user action?

Question

I want to keep track of the subscription status of the active billing agreements.

Now I thought webhooks would be handy for this.

I have a listener for BILLING.SUBSCRIPTION.CANCELLED which is described as

This event is triggered when a billing subscription is cancelled.

Now when a user goes to his paypal account and cancels the subscription, nothing gets fired. Only if I use the REST API to cancel the subscription, this hook fires. Where's the point in this? When I do an API call I get instant response that a subscription was cancelled or not, why would sb need an additional webhook for that?

The only useful application for this would be to be in track of what a user does with his paypal account. Now my question is: is this sandbox behaviour? Does the hook fire in "real world" when a user cancels the subscription/agreement through paypal directly?

Answer 1

You will need to use the IPN (Instant Payment Notification) message service for handling user triggered Subscription cancels via the PayPal Dashboard.

You can find a list of Recurring Payment notifications which are sent through the IPN here .

Also, you will quickly find out that their support for the IPN message service is very limited when testing code in development (they have an IPN Simulator , but it doesn't support Recurring notifications). So you will have to go through their variable documentation to see how best to implement the logic in your application.