Do you Create Invoices with PayPal? We want to hear from you!

[PayPal_Dinesh]

Have you used PayPal to create and send invoices or make payments on invoices sent to you?

If so, please reply to this topic to send us your thoughts on new features or improvements that you or your customers would like to see.

Do you have a question about invoice creation or payment?

Please first search this discussion board (Receiving Money) to see if your question has already been previously posted. If you post your question as a new topic, be sure to tag it with appropriate keywords like “Send Invoice”, “invoice payment” etc. as the case may be.

Thank you,

The PayPal Invoicing team

[shawnkhall]

While you *can* leave the date blank, the current system opens the date popup the second you enter the field, and only closes when you select a date, making it not user friendly for multiple rows or keyboard navigation. I find myself clicking a date, then filling out more of the form, then clicking another random date, then, when I'm done filing out the form, I go back and erase the dates since they're unnecessary - but cannot be easily avoided for those of us using keyboard navigation.

[Moskose]

Dinesh,

Do you know if there has been any progress on the invoices not showing up in the History download until they have been paid?

Also, any progress towards allowing us to create multiple invoices at one time?

thanks!

Moskose

[PayPal_Olivia]

Hi shawnkhall,

Thank you for your patience. I got answers back about the issue you brought up:

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Here's a copy of the SMTP logs from an invoice I sent today:

2011-02-24 09:35:35 66.211.168.230 SMTP-IN  1.2.3.4 1084 EHLO EHLO+mx0.phx.paypal.com 250-12pointdesign.com+[66.211.168.230],+this+server+offers+5+extensions SERVER 150 25 
2011-02-24 09:35:35 66.211.168.230 SMTP-IN  1.2.3.4 1084 MAIL MAIL+FROM:<shawn#example.com>+SIZE=11761 250+Requested+mail+action+okay,+completed SERVER 43 50 
2011-02-24 09:35:36 66.211.168.230 SMTP-IN example.com 1.2.3.4 1084 RCPT RCPT+TO:<shawn#example.com> 554+This+server+requires+you+to+send+from+an+IP+address+specified+by+the+SPF+for+example.com. SERVER 103 37 

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So the SPF policy is set for hardfail.  That is a fine decision, but will cause issues with this.

Large email receivers opt not to use SPF hard fails as a sole delivery choice because SPF is guaranteed to break for any forwarded messages.

The recommendation is to move to something that is cryptographically assured with a chance of succeeding with emails that are forwarded. 

The method used by the large email receivers is to only mark as spam or fail to deliver messages that fail BOTH SPF and DKIM. 

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Please, PayPal - it's actually VERY important that you not forge from addresses. Instead, you should be using service#paypal.com as the from address with a "reply-to" header of my address.

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We put both the envelope and body to be from the merchant, so the from address is not forged.  We then add the "Sender" header to allow the message to be accurately identified as being sent "on behalf of" the merchant.

I hope this helps!

Olivia

[shawnkhall]

Hi, Olivia,

While I apprecaite the response and the time you've taken for this, you're wrong. Your interpretation is that since you're acting on *behalf* of that email address, that it's "from" that user. That's an invalid assertion. Please view the following thread for more details:

https://www.paypal-community.com/t5/Receiving-money/Invoicing-is-currently-broken/m-p/202470

The original solution I was offered from PayPal support was to "whitelist the PayPal IP addresses." I can do that on MY servers, but not any of the potentially thousands of my customer servers. I don't control them. Even if I did, this is a completely backwards solution: it's relying on the RECIPIENT to relax their own spam and virus filters to allow your forged message to be received.

It's been several weeks now, and after "review", PayPal's response is to change the SPF settings on each of the RECIPIENT servers and email clients. Again, while I *could* do this on MY server, I cannot do this on each my potentially THOUSANDS of customer servers. Again, I don't control them. Even if I did, your "new" solution still relies on each of them to relax the spam and virus filtering controls of their servers -- INSTEAD of fixing the ACTUAL problem which is within your own system.

The bottom line is that you cannot reliably send mail "from" any other user within the MAIL FROM command. You can assign the "from" header *later* in the message, but it cannot and must not be assigned to an email address you DO NOT control within this SMTP "MAIL FROM" command. Doing so *is* forgery/spoofing, and JUSTLY should be blocked. Period.

If you don't want to accept it from me, I understand. I'm just an expert in the field with 20 years experience and a new chip on my shoulder because I can no longer rely on PayPal for payment from my clients.

Even so, you should probably spend a little more time contacting the experts in the industry on this instead of relying on a programmer that's just trying to defend his work. Maybe contact someone from Google, Comcast, Symantec, Amazon or any of the other hundreds of businesses actually involved in filtering forged messages:

http://www.google.com/search?q=%22mail+from%22+forge+spoof

Failing to correct this problem only encourages phishing. And it's going to cause many of your customers to have to go elsewhere instead of use PayPal for business purposes. Quite simply: if I can't rely on my messages being received, I won't get paid. That's a big deal to me, and every other business user on PayPal.

[klique]

I went to invoice customers this AM only to find that somthing that needed to take me 5 miniuets now takes me 1/2 hr.

Its confusing and backwards compared to the other previous one.

I suggest you make slight  adjustments and not rework the entire page.

You coud have added a few of these things without changing the whole format.

This **bleep** 

[Gladysa]

I am an Ebay seller and also have business clients in my area that I send invoices to. The following would be very helpful: 

1) After creating an invoice, Paypal sends an email with the subject:" Receipt for your invoice". It would be more helpful it the subject line read: "Invoice receipt to {email address}. When I get these emails I have to forward them to myself and move them to a folder called Invoices and redo the subject line.

2) When Payment is received by a client it would help if there were a link in the email to the original invoice sent to the client or at least in the transaction details in Paypal.. rather than searching Paypal for the invoice (that's another story).

3) Can you add a note area that a client can't see?

Suggestion for Multi-Shipping:

1) Let's say I have 15 Ebay orders. Of the 15 - 10 have already been shipped (marked shipped in Ebay). It would be helpful if Paypal only imports items that are 'NOT' marked shipped in Ebay.

2) Drop box  Package and Weight text was a little bigger.

[PayPal_Dinesh]

Hi Gladysa,

Thank you for your detailed feedback.

Yesterday we rolled out our new Invoicing platform to all our customers. Based on the changes in the new Invoicing tool, I've posted my responses on what behavior you will now see. Please send us your feedback on the new Invoicing tool once you've had the chance to get familiar with it.

Thanks,

Dinesh

PayPal Invoicing team

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1) After creating an invoice, Paypal sends an email with the subject:" Receipt for your invoice". It would be more helpful it the subject line read: "Invoice receipt to {email address}. When I get these emails I have to forward them to myself and move them to a folder called Invoices and redo the subject line.

 The subject now says…”You sent an invoice (######) to [Recipient Name] for $[Amount] USD”

2) When Payment is received by a client it would help if there were a link in the email to the original invoice sent to the client or at least in the transaction details in Paypal.. rather than searching Paypal for the invoice (that's another story).

There is now a link to the invoice in the payment receipt.

3) Can you add a note area that a client can't see?

There is a now a memo field that the client won't see.

[charlesjp]

If you create an invoice for a cash payment and a merchant marks the invoice paid will you forward the client a receipt? I would love to send consistent emails to all of my clients and it would make it much easier.

[MollyBad]

Yes -- I love the invoicing option but I do have one MAJOR problem with it. When my customer pays my invoice, I don't get an e-mail notice from PayPal saying the invoice was paid! This is odd, because you e-mail me when I have other payments to my account.

I should not have to log on to PayPal several times a day or week to periodically check to see if an invoice has been paid. That seems to be an easy-enough fix for you folks to make. How 'bout it?!

[Trigger78]

How can I cancel an invoice without sending an email to the customer? There was a checkbox for this before the recent invoice upgrades.