Other PayPal Problems

If you continue to experience problems with PayPal after thoroughly checking your settings both in PayPal and in Payage, it may be useful to understand a little more about what happens when a PayPal transaction is processed by Payage.

  • The Payage Application (for example Rentalot Plus) requests published payment buttons from Payage.
  • Payage checks your accounts and generates the HTML code for all published accounts.
  • The customer clicks a PayPal button and is redirected to the PayPal payment pages.
  • As soon as the customer pays, the money moves to your PayPal account.
  • PayPal redirects the customer back to your site.
  • Payage performs a PDT (Payment Data Transfer) message exchange with PayPal to validate the transaction, which requires that Payage knows the "Token" set in your PayPal account.
  • If the PDT succeeds, Payage redirects to the calling Application (e.g. Rentalot Plus), which displays its payment confirmation page.
  • If the PDT fails (because the token is wrong, or for any other reason) the transaction is marked as "failed", and the Application displays its failure page.
  • Soon afterwards, PayPal will send out an IPN (Instant Payment Notification) message confirming the transaction.
  • Payage receives and processes the IPN message, which does not require the Token. So the IPN can succeed even if the PDT fails. If this happens, Payage will change the payment status from 'failed' to 'success', and will then notify the Application. However, by this time the user has already seen the failure message. If the user were to refresh the page, he may well then see the success page, but he won't know to do that.

Note that it is possible for the IPN message to reach Payage before the browser is redirected back to your site. In such cases, the PDT exchange is not required, and is not performed, because the IPN confirmation is secure and sufficient to confirm the transaction. If you look closely at the History section of a Payage transaction, you can see whether the transaction was confirmed by PDT or IPN.

Here's a case where the browser got back to our site before the IPN message arrived, and the PDT exchange was successful:

2020-12-07 09:10:24 - PDT: Success
2020-12-07 09:10:43 - IPN: Same status

Here's a case where the browser got back to our site before the IPN message arrived, but the Token was incorrect:

2020-12-06 09:46:12 - PDT: Failed (Error: 4020)
2020-12-06 09:46:43 - IPN: Success

And here's a case where the IPN message arrived before the browser:

2020-12-08 09:08:58 - IPN: Success
2020-12-08 09:09:07 - PDT: Not required

In all cases of PayPal problems, an examination of the details of the payment record in Payage should reveal the cause of the problem, or at least some useful clues.