Recieved payments not being emailed to me

[minifrets]

I have a little website with paypal buttons and a simple check out page on it, it's been active for just over a year now and until today when I noticed something I have never had an issue.

I was in my account for something else paying someone and i noticed 2 inbound payments from buttons on my website ordering products, yet I never got the email notification of these orders! 

Normally I get a "You've got money" email with details of who to ship to and what they ordered, the details are IN my paypal acct here but I would never even know these orders came in if I hadn't been IN my account on paypal doing something else!

It's been about 3 hours since I got the 2 orders that I can see in paypal but so far still no email notifications of those orders to let me know hey these guys ordered stuff ship it out etc.

I guess I am a bit paranoid that I may be missing orders if things come in and i don't get notified.  I went back thru and was able to verify the previous orders I have gotten all did come thru email wise for me, i've confirmed its not in my spam folders or anything, and i've never had that happen previously, maybe I just never saw when an order came in and the You've got money email is just delayed and will still come but at this point i am starting to wonder if I hadn't been in there today what would happen if I didn't even get notification of a payment.

Has this ever happened to anyone that may be able to shed some light on the situation, so far it's worked great for me, not volume business but first hiccup I have seen and just feel like i may have to be checking in every night or other day to confirm no orders just sit there without me knowing.

[LogicIndustries]

This exact thing happened to me today.

I got a payment at ~11:30 AM PST, but as of 7:23 PM PST I have not gotten an email notification of it.

It was not shunted to spam, and I got an email notification for the eBay payment I sent at 7pm (which is how I discovered the unnotified payment, I had funds in my PayPal account when there shouldn't have been any), but nothing about the inbound payment.

I've had this happen a few times off and on over the last several years.

Wondering what is going on, because I cannot spend half the day checking into my PayPal account to see if anything was bought off my website, but I also can't afford to miss someone's order because I wasn't notified of it.

[minifrets]

Ok this could have been a paypal OR gmail glitch not sure, but i did finally get those two purchase email notifications this morning, so about 18 hours after I saw them in paypal when I was just in the account paying someone.   So I feel better they finally came through vs me wondering each day do I have sales i don't know about sitting in paypal, could just be gmail not even paypal but I wondered if this had happened to anyone else before, seems to have been just a delayed reaction/response here but they did finally come thru on mine.

[LogicIndustries]

You are not alone, I too got my missing email very early this morning.

The original sale was a 11:30AM on 3/3, and the email notification of same finally arrived on 3/4 at 3:15AM, so a delay of almost exactly 16hrs.

Not sure if that's coincidental or what. I do know now that several other PayPal emails were also delayed (not payment received emails, but other notifications from PayPal), but not for as long.

Maybe they had an outage on one of their email servers? I dunno. Hope it doesn't keep happening though.

[tayl]

I'm having this issue as well. I came here to post about it before I saw your thread. My payment e-mails today and for the previous 1-2 days have arrived consistently 12+ hours late. It's a serious issue that needs to be addressed ASAP. It's not just e-mail - any notifications that would normally come instantly are delayed by the same amount of time (mobile notifications specifically).

[paulatthehug]

Sadly this does seem to happen periodically and we saw it again overnight our time (UTC+0). We've been taking payments via PayPal for 18 months and I think this is the third time I've seen in happening. The mail always turns up in the end, but in our experience it can be delayed by up to 24 hours. This is clearly not acceptable if you're a merchant.

The solution we've adopted is not to rely on emails to tell you when you've received a payment but instead to use PayPal's IPN mechanism. Google for it and you'll find lots of examples of how to use it but essentially PayPal pings your server with an HTTP request with the payment details in POST. You then verify that it's from them using another HTTP request back to their server to which they respond.

This has the advantages that over relying on email that:

1. It would be a lot harder for someone to forge a payment
2. In our experience it's very reliable and we've not seen any significant delays. Normally we get the IPN ping within seconds of the customer paying. I think the longest delay we've seen was in the order of 15 minutes.

The down side is that all this requires code, but you may find that whatever merchant solution you're using on your web site offers IPN processing (we rolled our own code, because we could ;-))

[LogicIndustries]

That's all well and good if your nerdfu is strong enough to pull such an implementation off.

However, I'm a machinist not a programmer.

It's all I can do to keep a simple HTML website up and running. I'm just using PayPal buttons and their generic shopping cart setup, and I barely understand THAT.

Going to anything more complex is pretty much a nonstarter for me.

Everything runs on a shoestring around here, so I can't just pay someone to do it for me either. If I can't do it myself, it just don't get done.

There's no reason this cannot work. I've been using this method for close to fifteen years and it's been fine.

Now suddenly it's an unreliable method? Come on.

When things are working, I wish they'd stop trying to "improve" them. More often than not, "improve" in practice actually means "break".

When stuff ain't broke, don't go fixing it until it is.