How To Setup Multiple IPN Receivers in PayPal
Instant Payment Notifications (IPN) allow your applications to receive notifications from PayPal on payments made. This means that your application can fulfill an order automatically upon receiving such a notification. However, when you get your second application up with its own IPN you suddenly find out that PayPal lets you set only one Notification URL.
Of course there’s the whole notify_url charade and counterparts for all of PayPal’s APIs, but, unfortunately, there are cases when you simply can’t get to set those:
- Plugins that are hard-coded, where you can’t alter their core and they just force you to set the URL, so you end up locked in; this may be true for all sorts of applications in all sorts of languages (especially true for compiled ones)
- Third-party billing services like e-Junkie, Kajabi, 1shoppingcart and many others, they just lock you in, and tell you to set the IPN in PayPal
- Subscriptions and Recurring Payments; yep, PayPal does not allow you to bind a specific IPN for subscriptions at all (let me know if I’m incorrect, but I’ve spent days looking at the manuals)
- Multiplexing one IPN to two or more sources, for synchronization, custom alerts etc.
For everything else, modify your forms and API calls to include the notify_url attribute.
The easiest and most straightforward solution would be to get multiple PayPal accounts, right? Right, BUT:
No Multiple Accounts. Should you register for more than one Personal Account, PayPal reserves the right to terminate all of your accounts and will restrict you from the system going forward. Users may register and hold one Personal Account and either one Premier or one Business Account.
…from PayPal’s Terms and Conditions
So unless you have a separate legal business entity (company) for each Business Account), you’re out of luck. However, there a simple and sweet way to overcome this single IPN URL business – receive IPN and broadcast it.