Creating an Instant Payment Notification (IPN) with PayPal Website Payments Pro to receive recurring payment notifications

If you are using the Donations app to accept recurring donations using PayPal Website Payments Pro as your payment gateway, you can have notification of the subsequent monthly transactions sent to Soapbox to be stored in the Donations > Transactions. If you have Salesforce integration enabled, this will also create a record in Salesforce for the subsequent transaction.

In order to enable this functionality, you'll need to create an Instant Payment Notification (IPN) within PayPal Website Payments Pro that will instruct PayPal to update Soapbox whenever a subsequent monthly transaction is process for an ongoing recurring donation. To do so:

1. Login to PayPal
2. Go to Profile
3. Click My Selling Tools
4. Click Instant Payment Notification
5. Click Choose IPN Settings
6. For URL, enter the following, replacing {myaccountprefix} with the prefix of your Soapbox site:
   
   https://{myaccountprefix}.secure.nonprofitsoapbox.com/component/donations/transactionNotification
   
   If your Soapbox site uses a custom URL with a custom SSL certificate, you may enter the following, replacing {www.myorg.org} with your Soapbox site URL:
   
   https://{www.myorg.org}/component/donations/transactionNotification
   
   
7. For IPN Message, select Receive IPN messages (Enabled)
8. 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 Website Payments Pro. Records added to the Donations > Transactions view will have a Payment Occurrence of “Subsequent recurring."