PayPal ‘Instant Payment Notification’ (IPN) Setup

First, you will need to login to your paypal account. Once you get to your main account page, on the top right there is a link to your “profile” (figure 1.0), click on this link.

From the profile page, you will see three columns of links. The far right column “Selling Preferences” has a link underneath it called “Instant Payment Notification Preferences” (figure 1.1), click on that link.

On the Instant Notification page, click on the Edit button on the bottom right corner (figure 1.2)

On the following page check the checkbox that says “Instant Payment Notification integrates PayPal payment notification.”, and then copy and past the URL that we will give you (e.g. http://www.yourdomain.com/process_ipn.php) into the textbox that should only have “http://” in it (figure 1.3):

Now, go back to the profile page illustrated in Figure 1.1 and from the left of the three columns, select “Email” under the “Account Information” column.

On the following page, you will see all e-mails associated with this particular paypal account. If you have more than one, only one e-mail will be your “primary e-mail”, and it will be bolded and have the word “primary” to the right of it as illustrated in Figure 1.4.

Now, my suggestion is that you add an e-mail for “payments@yourdomain.com” and make it either just a sub-email or make it the primary e-mail. Having an e-mail that says payments@yourdomain.com looks more professional than having an e-mail that says yourname@hotmail.com. Since users will see the e-mail and base some of their trust for paying you based on the e-mail, it’s good to look as professional as possible. Your hotmail e-mail can still be your primary e-mail, but it is likely better to do a payments@yourdomain.com as a secondary e-mail at the very least.

Finally, what I need from you is the list of e-mails that I’m going to use. If you only have the one e-mail, then just let me know that there is only one e-mail for your PayPal account and what that e-mail is. Otherwise, if you have two e-mails, I need to know what e-mail we are using for your site (preferrably payments@yourdomain.com), and if that e-mail isn’t your “primary e-mail”, then I also need to know what your primary e-mail is. So, simple send us an e-mail with the e-mails that you have setup in your PayPal account like follows:

 If the IPN checkbox is checked in Figure 1.3, the correct URL was entered into the IPN text box (also Figure 1.3), and we have your PayPal e-mail address(es), then we are good to go. The next step will be to test it out.