Are experiencing issues with recurring orders or other updates not being reflected on your membership site? This problem is most commonly caused by a problem with PayPal’s Instant Payment Notification (IPN) system.

First, you need to work through our troubleshooting guide on how to resolve IPN issues. Then, you need to repair missing data in your membership site. This guide shows you how to resend PayPal PayPal IPN to update your site’s orders and memberships.

How to Resend PayPal IPN History

What is PayPal IPN?

IPN is a system that sends a message from PayPal to your website to confirm payment and update your site with the transaction details.

If the IPN is not working properly, your site may not receive the necessary information to update orders or membership status. In this case, you can resend PayPal IPN to repair any missing data.

But before you can resend IPN, you must first fix any issues with IPN. Check out our two troubleshooting guides for debugging and troubleshooting below:

How to Resend PayPal IPN History

  1. Log in to PayPal.
  2. Under the profile icon in the upper right, go to Account Settings.
  3. Click on Website Payments in the left sidebar.
  4. Click the Update button for Instant Payment Notifications.
PayPal Account Settings > Website payments > Instant Payment Notifications

  1. Click on IPN History Page to view your history.
PayPal IPN settings click on IPN History page to access log

  1. Change the filters to show the IPN log since the date you believe orders were missing.
  2. Locate the payments you want to resend PayPal IPN in the list view. The specific transactions that need to be resent for missing orders have a log entry type where txn_type = recurring_payment. It is important to only resend these transactions, so click through the messages to see which have that txn_type.
  3. Once you know the messages to resend, check individual boxes on this screen or check multiple in one batch.
  4. Click the button to resend the selected IPN log.
PayPal IPN history page with checkboxes to show how to resend IPN history in batch

By following this process, you can be sure that the issue is properly resolved and the gateway is sending your site all necessary information. However, it’s important to note that resending IPN history will only work if the issue is on the PayPal side—not on your website side.

If the problem persists after resending the IPN, it could be caused by an issue on your website’s end, such as a configuration issue, SSL certification, or firewall that’s blocking IPN notifications. In this case, you may need to consult our troubleshooting guides, or ask your website developer or hosting provider to further investigate and resolve the issue.

In any case, it’s a good idea to contact PayPal support for further assistance if you continue to experience issues with IPN and recurring orders on your membership site.

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