In a previous post I tried to give an introduction on how to get started with PayPal Payment Data Transfers (PDT). PDT is very handy in several cases, but you can’t always rely on it since it requires the user to return to your page after doing the payment. That will often happen, but it’s not guaranteed to happen. If you for example want to mark an order in your system as paid or something like that, you most likely want to use PayPal Instant Payment Notifications (IPN) in addition to PDT.

Instant Payment Notification (IPN) is a message service that notifies you of events related to PayPal transactions. You can use it to automate back-office and administrative functions, such as fulfilling orders, tracking customers, and providing status and other information related to a transaction. — PayPal

Once again the documentation, tutorials and code samples I found on this was a bit all over the place. Sort of messy and outdated. So, once again I decided to do my own thing and just follow the steps required and implement them myself. And since the tutorial on PDT turned out to be a bit of a success, I decided to share this too. Hopefully it can make the lives of fellow developers easier 🙂

Continue reading PHP Tutorial: PayPal Instant Payment Notification (IPN) →