Subscription via paypal no longer working due to reconfiguration of paypal account

[stardotstar]

Looking for some simple suggestions guys and perhaps confirmation that I have correctly identified my problem.

For a while now the subscription system has been working fine using my (current) paypal account.

Users pay for one of several subscriptions and their membership status is modified appropriately.

Just today I had a user complain that their member status had reverted after they had placed a renewing subscription (I don't use automatic renewals and people just renew themselves each year)

I was surprised becuase his user account only showed the expired one.

In Paypal his payment did indeed show and was successful and included a receipt and everything.

Then I realised that I had set up some merchant services to take paypal payments from a cart.

I take it that if the paypal account is configured to "return" the client to somewhere then the vBulletin never sees the transaction again.

The fields I changed to set up the merchant side of the paypal account were:

Auto Return is turned on and a Return URL is specificed to the cart not the vbulletin - in the past this was turned off because I had never had cause to use it to get vB to work with subscriptions.

Payment Data Transfer (Optional) is also ON

Am I right in suspecting that these options will break the process of paypal subscriptions in vB>

TIA
Will

ps I should also say that I am currently registering a new paypal account for the cart and will return the original one for the forums once I have everything sorted out. Just need confirmation that this is the best way to resolve this issue/proceed.

[Trevor Hannant]

Yes, vB needs to know about it otherwise it will revert any subscription based changes. If PayPal doesn't notify the vB Payment system that someone has renewed then vB will assume that the subscription period has ended.

[stardotstar]

OK this is an interesting one...

I opened a second paypal account (somewhat inconvenient straightaway) and then found that I couldn't use the same business bank account with two paypal accounts (very inconvenient) which left me needing to go back to using the original paypal account for both the cart and vB. Having lodged a question with paypal they advise me that it can be done by hardwiring the return url and ipn data in the button code.

I will look into this in the way that vB does the subscriptions and see if I can do this.

You can Do this all through the same account to avoid opening multiple accounts. For example if your Notification URL is set in your PayPal Account Profile, you can set a separate notification URL in your using the variable "notify_url" in your PayPal button code. When you set the "notify_url" variable in your button code, it overrides the Notification URL set in your Profile. For example if I had a return page in my profile as http://www.mysite.com/IPN.php I could add the following line of code to the payment buttons for one site:

<input type="hidden" name="notify_url" value="http://www.MySite.com/newpage.php">

And all the IPNs for payment buttons using this variable would be sent to the corresponding url. Likewise, you can specify a different Return URL to use for PDT than the one listed in your Profile settings by adding/editing the HTML (variable: return) associated with a button or a link. For example If I had a return page in my profile as http://www.mysite.com/return.php I could add the following line of code to a payment button:

<input type="hidden" name="return" value="http://www.MySite.com/newpage.php">

By adding this line or by making this change to an existing "return" value anyone that buys from the button I have added the code to will be returned to "newpage.php" instead of the one still listed in my profile

It is interesting that this has not come up - well my searches don't show this as an issue that vB users have had to tackle before, or their skills with wiring up the paypal buttons and/or configuring the cart rather than vB are well above mine.

If I get joy I will certainly post my solution here since I suspect it may help someone out there one day. I can;t be the only one with a cart, single linked business account and paypal account.

Thanks

Will.

[stardotstar]

I have done some more testing and found that the problem was unrelated - to do with the cart being on another server and nameresolution failing on the vB one locally. I think that this was it - I have configured the paypal account to have the PDT and IPN for the cart and the paid subscriptions are going through ok...