PayPal showing customers as "not-paid" even after paying.

Discussion in 'Installation' started by simplesubjects, May 17, 2008.

  1. simplesubjects

    simplesubjects New Member

    Joined:
    May 16, 2008
    Messages:
    1
    Hello everybody.

    I'm using Joomla 1.5 and PayPal. After some work, things seem to be nearly good to go. One big problem though: When I do a test payment, the payment goes through (shows up on my credit card, and the $ shows up in my paypal account), but it still shows the customer as "not paid."

    Here's the error from the error log:
    paypal_r ERROR: IPN validation error: Paypal claims it is not-valid IPN transaction: [INVALID]

    Anybody know what I have to do to fix this?

    Thanks ahead of time. :)
  2. calisolllc

    calisolllc Member

    Joined:
    Feb 19, 2007
    Messages:
    194
    Is the credit card you are using the card you have registered with Paypal?
    Because when I first started testing my installation over a year back I had the same problem when using my card that was registered with paypal, but when I tried a different card everything worked as has since.
    I asked Paypal about it and they said something about not using your own backup funding card to pay for transactions to your own account.
    It comes under the blanket of an illegal cash advance.
  3. tomfra

    tomfra Member

    Joined:
    Dec 21, 2006
    Messages:
    199
    My personal suggestion - get a PayPal sandbox account at https://developer.paypal.com , that will allow you to test everything without doing any live transactions and aMember has direct support for the sandbox accounts.

    Tomas
  4. davidm1

    davidm1 aMember User & Partner

    Joined:
    May 16, 2006
    Messages:
    4,437
    To test my sites, I created a 2nd paypal account with payment via bank. This way your not violating any credit card "illegal cash advance" issues.

    Maybe a good step after you've tested with sandbox.

    David
  5. tomfra

    tomfra Member

    Joined:
    Dec 21, 2006
    Messages:
    199
    Well, I believe you can test really everything (or everything important) with the sandbox and the IPN should behave the same way as the live account so I do not see a reason to test it with one beside of it. On the other hand, there is nothing like "enough testing" ;)

    Tomas
  6. ronniead

    ronniead Member

    Joined:
    Dec 20, 2007
    Messages:
    118
    This is quite strange. I've never had this error before in my log, but on the 15th of March till the 17th of March, I had lot of transactions that came up with that same error message:

    paypal_r ERROR: IPN validation error: Paypal claims it is not-valid IPN transaction: [INVALID]

    It seems to be okay now, but I had to create the subscriptions manually, which was really annoying....also, I was **very** lucky that I even spotted it, as I very rarely check my error log anyway...

    Perhaps it was a Paypal problem?
  7. CrackBaby

    CrackBaby Member

    Joined:
    Aug 22, 2006
    Messages:
    154
    It was paypal issue, we chased it for a week and narrowed it down to paypal not talking correctly to our server.

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