Our “PayPal for WooCommerce” plugin does not have IPN tied into it at all the way PayPal Standard that comes with WooCommerce does.
What we did instead, because IPN is so powerful, is we built a separate plugin: PayPal IPN for WordPress
Using that plugin you can do whatever you want to do with IPN, and it has does have documentation about how to use the plugin, but it doesn’t cover IPN specifically.
For example, you could use it to automatically update the WooCommerce order status based on payment status provided by IPN.
PayPal provides plenty of info about what exactly IPN is and how to use it technically. Don’t let that scare you, though. With the use of a plugin like ours the whole thing becomes very simple.
If you have any specific questions about how you’d like to use IPN I’d be happy to elaborate more.
Well that’s the thing, I don’t know what I need or don’t need. I just want to be able to sell physical/shipped goods, as well as downloadable goods. With my previous shopping cart, I didn’t have to do anything except specify the API credentials and select whether the payment action was a Sale or Authorization (I had Sale selected) With that setting, it just meant that any sales made on my website were instantly available in my Paypal account. Then at the end of the month, I’d transfer the funds to my checking account and that was it. So I really just want to re-create that scenario. The only thing that’s different now is that I’ll have downloadable products so I want to make sure that when someone pays with Paypal, that they get their download granted simultaneously.
Ok, so you don’t even really need IPN for what you outlined there.
What I would recommend is that you login to your PayPal and disable e-checks. That way people have to have funds available immediately to pay you.
In our plugin you can set it for Sale just like you mentioned in your last cart, and the money will drop into PayPal immediately.
The WooCommerce system then takes care of delivering the downloadable product for you.
Great, thank you for clarifying. It just seemed everywhere I turned, I kept seeing things about IPN, so I didn’t know if I needed to deal with it or not. Yes, I know about e-checks, they’re annoying because they hold the funds for like a week or something like that.
So I just did the sandbox test and everything worked as it should. Before the site launches, I’ll do some live tests as well but I think it’s good for now.
