Creating an Instant Payment Notification (IPN) with PayPal Standard to receive recurring payment notifications

Unlike PayPal Website Payments Pro, for donation transactions originating with Soapbox, you do not need to alter Instant Payment Notification (IPN) settings in your PayPal Standard account to receive recurring payment notifications from PayPal to Soapbox. These notifications will be sent to Soapbox without any manual step on your part.

For any recurring donation setup with PayPal Standard, PayPal will send notification of subsequent monthly transactions to Soapbox to be stored in the Donations > Transactions. Records added to the Donations > Transactions view will have a Payment Occurrence of “Subsequent recurring."

If you have Salesforce integration enabled, this will also create a record in Salesforce for the subsequent transaction.

For donation transactions originating outside of Soapbox prior to adopting the Donations app, you will need to setup an Instant Payment Notification (IPN) within PayPal that will instruct PayPal to update Soapbox whenever a subsequent monthly transaction is process for an ongoing recurring donation.

To do so:

1. Log in to your PayPal business account at www.paypal.com.
2. Click the settings icon at the top of your PayPal account page and then click Account Settings.
3. On the Notifications page, click the Update link for the Instant payment notifications item.
4. Click Choose IPN Settings to specify your listener's URL and activate the listener.
5. Specify the URL for your listener in the Notification URL field. Enter the following, replacing {myaccountprefix} with the prefix of your Soapbox site:
   
   https://{myaccountprefix}.secure.nonprofitsoapbox.com/component/donations/transactionNotification
6. Click Receive IPN messages (Enabled) to enable your listener.
7. Click Save.

Once this IPN is in place, notification will be sent to Soapbox whenever a subsequent payment is made on both existing and future recurring donations in PayPal. Records added to the Donations > Transactions view will have a Payment Occurrence of “Subsequent recurring."