Orders Stuck in Pending Payment in Magento Due to Paypal Disabling IPN

This is quite a common issue in Magento where some orders which were paid via Paypal get stuck in ‘Pending Payment’ status. After debugging the issue, often you’ll arrive at the problem of the IPN message delivery in Paypal keeps getting disabled.

Once the IPN message delivery is disabled, Paypal can’t communicate that payment was received (or failed) back to Magento so subsequently, the order status can’t progress past ‘Pending Payment’. Once this communication fails, you may see an error message similar to the below in your error logs:-

Notice: Undefined index: invoice  in /var/www/vhosts/domain.com/httpdocs/app/code/core/Mage/Paypal/Model/Ipn.php on line 173

If you happen to speak to Paypal’s support team about the issue, they will likely report that the IPN keeps getting disabled because they keep receiving a server error 503 header response code back from their IPN communication (even though the actual IPN URL in Magento can be returning a 200 header response code).

So the cause of this is usually that you’re taking payments via Paypal for more than one sales channel (this will usually be Magento and eBay or Amazon). You will have already set your IPN notification URL in Paypal to the one that Magento requires:-

For Magento 1.7.x, 1.8.x, 1.9.x : http://www.domain.com/paypal/ipn/

For Magento 1.4.x, 1.5.x, 1.6.x: http://www.domain.com/paypal/ipn/standard/

For Magento 1.3.x: http://www.domain.com/paypal/standard/ipn/

When you sell an item via eBay or Amazon, PayPal tries to send an IPN message to your Magento IPN listener which fails as the order did not originate in Magento so Paypal receive an error back. Once a few errors are received, Paypal disable your IPN message delivery automatically and then any more orders paid for with Paypal in your Magento store cannot complete subsequently getting stuck as ‘Payment Pending’.

What you will need to do is create a centralised IPN listener which will allow you to receive IPN notifications for multiple channels. Simply create a file named null_ipn.php and place it in your Magento root. Then save the below in this file.

<?php

// Revision Notes
// 11/04/11 - changed post back url from https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr to https://ipnpb.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr
// For more info see below:
// https://www.x.com/content/bulletin-ip-address-expansion-paypal-services
// "ACTION REQUIRED: if you are using IPN (Instant Payment Notification) for Order Management and your IPN listener script is behind a firewall that uses ACL (Access Control List) rules which restrict outbound traffic to a limited number of IP addresses, then you may need to do one of the following:
// To continue posting back to https://www.paypal.com  to perform IPN validation you will need to update your firewall ACL to allow outbound access to *any* IP address for the servers that host your IPN script
// OR Alternatively, you will need to modify  your IPN script to post back IPNs to the newly created URL https://ipnpb.paypal.com using HTTPS (port 443) and update firewall ACL rules to allow outbound access to the ipnpb.paypal.com IP ranges (see end of message)."


// read the post from PayPal system and add 'cmd'
$req = 'cmd=_notify-validate';

foreach ($_POST as $key => $value) {
$value = urlencode(stripslashes($value));
$req .= "&$key=$value";
}

// post back to PayPal system to validate
$header  = "POST /cgi-bin/webscr HTTP/1.1\r\n";
$header .= "Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded\r\n";
$header .= "Content-Length: " . strlen($req) . "\r\n\r\n";

//If testing on Sandbox use:
//$fp = fsockopen ('ssl://www.sandbox.paypal.com', 443, $errno, $errstr, 30);
$fp = fsockopen ('ssl://ipnpb.paypal.com', 443, $errno, $errstr, 30);


if (!$fp) {
// HTTP ERROR
} else {
fputs ($fp, $header . $req);
while (!feof($fp)) {
$res = fgets ($fp, 1024);
if (strcmp ($res, "VERIFIED") == 0) {
// check the payment_status is Completed
// check that txn_id has not been previously processed
// check that receiver_email is your Primary PayPal email
// check that payment_amount/payment_currency are correct
// process payment


// echo the response
echo "The response from IPN was: <b>" .$res ."</b><br><br>";

//loop through the $_POST array and print all vars to the screen.

foreach($_POST as $key => $value){

        echo $key." = ". $value."<br>";



}


}
else if (strcmp ($res, "INVALID") == 0) {
// log for manual investigation

// echo the response
echo "The response from IPN was: <b>" .$res ."</b>";

  }

}
fclose ($fp);
}
?>

Then log in to your Paypal account and set your Paypal IPN Notification URL to the path to this file in your Magento root. For example: http://www.domain.com/null_ipn.php.