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Why aren't donations made off-site with PayPal not being saved to Salesforce?

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If you have enabled PayPal as a payment option for visitors who wish to make a donation off-site directly through PayPal, these transactions will be saved to Salesforce, if you have Salesforce integration enabled for your form. This update to Salesforce is made possible by a service called Instant Payment Notification (IPN) that allows PayPal to message Soapbox when the payment is complete so that Soapbox can then create the appropriate record in Salesforce.

If transactions are not being saved to Salesforce, here are a few things you can check.

1) Confirm that the Salesforce integration is enabled for the Soapbox Donation form

You can do so by going to the Integration tab and confirming that Salesforce Integration is set to "On", or "Use Global Config", if the configuration for the Soapbox Donations app has been set to "On".

To check the configuration setting, go to Donations > Configuration > Integrations tab and confirm that Salesforce Integration is set to "On".

2) Ensure that IPN is not disabled

You shouldn't need to explicitly enable Instant Payment Notifications since Soapbox transmits this request to PayPal for each transaction but doing so will allow you to review the IPN history for troubleshooting in #3.

To do so:

  1. Log into your PayPal account 
  2. Go to Account Settings
  3. Click Website Payments
  4. For Instant Payment Notifications, click Update
  5. Under Current Settings in the Instant Payment Notification (IPN) view, if Message Delivery is set to disabled, click the “Edit settings” button 
  6. Enable message delivery
  7. For the URL, you can use the secure version of any URL for any Donation form on your site. Soapbox will pass the relevant form-specific URL at the time of each transaction.
  8. Click Save
  9. Confirm that the Message Delivery status has been updated to Enabled

3) Login to PayPal to review IPN history and submit a ticket here with details

If the Salesforce integration is turned on for the Soapbox Donation form and IPN is enabled with PayPal, it will be helpful for you to check the IPN history in your PayPal account and open a ticket with us giving details of what you find. To do so:

  1. Log into your PayPal account
  2. Go to History > IPN History
  3. View IPN history in the last 5 days - or you can change the timeframe if no history is present for the last 5 days 
  4. Note the Delivery Status of any IPN history entries are (e.g., Failed, Sent, Disabled, Retrying, Queued)
  5. If you're able to resend one of the IPNs, please do so and let us know which you resent
  6. Open a ticket and provide a screenshot of the IPN History view
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