Paypal IPN Status - Queued

15
votes

I'm using paypal sandbox to do some test payments and they have all been coming though fine until today. I'm not receiving an IPN from paypal and when I check in the IPN notification history all the messages are showing as Queued

If I resend an IPN that has a status of sent I receive that fine but none of the new ones are coming through.

I've checked my error logs on the server and I'm not getting any coding errors.

Am I doing something wrong or is this just a backlog on PayPals end?

5
paypalpaypal-ipn
the same thing happends to me, i was about to ask here too. I think their server are busy or overloaded with ipns or something thats why it's queued. Don't know, hope someone posts a better answer. – Kilise
I think so. I've been waiting for like 6 hours. – Kilise
I spent the last two hours debugging this, and there's been no update on the status site. Otherwise, I'm glad to see that I'm not the only one facing this issue. – Jaryl
I'm having the same problem too. – mclaassen
For each bug I have with PayPal, I come accross an SO thread where everyone gets along that "this is a problem at their end". :) – Léon Pelletier

5 Answers

10
votes

I have the same problem - 2 years after the original post.

I wonder if this has to do with using a sandbox - and if it happens also in regular accounts.

I can get IPN messages using the simulator and event by asking the broken sandbox facilitator account to resent messages - all work find. It is just that new messages origincating from the broken sandbox facilitator account are endlessly queued.

I am quite certain given the evidence that this is NOT related to PayPal backlog.
My first messaged was queued 25 hours ago (and since it started I got plenty of messaged as resent IPN messaged + simulator messages).

ADDED: 3 days later, woke up thing morning to find out that suddenly all my queued messages in my IPN were served. Seems like they have some very slow process (humanized maybe?) that does solves the issue (identify stuck queues and get them running again). Once a queue is stuck, all following new messages get the QUEUE status until the nice PaylPal process get them running.

As indicated above, seems like all complaints are related to the sandbox accounts - this may mean that the process is much faster for non sandbox accounts or that the problem just does not occur in the real accounts.

7
votes

For anyone experiencing this error I started receiving my IPN messages again this morning. So must have been a problem at PayPals end.

7
votes

I'll post my workaround since I and others are still having trouble with PayPal's sandbox 2.5 years later:

  1. Go into your IPN settings and set it to "Do not receive IPN messages (Disabled)",
  2. Initiate the test payment. The transaction will show as "disabled" instead of "queued" in the transactions history.
  3. Then, set IPN notifications to "Receive IPN messages (Enabled)". When you view your history, you will have the checkbox next to the transaction.
  4. You can then check the checkbox and resend.

I know this isn't an ideal solution because it requires some extra steps, but at least it will allow us to test using the sandbox.

2
votes

I've had the same problem all day Mark. I know IPNs are getting through to my website because I was able to have Paypal re-send an earlier IPN OK, also manually sending a test IPN worked fine.

Maybe there is a huge backlog to be sent out after their problems earlier today.

John

0
votes

The PayPal Sandbox is supposed to let us test the PayPal functionality from the comfort of a fake/test environment.

However, in practice: the Sandbox environment is much slower than the production environment – and often abnormally slow.

Here is an example that's, sadly, fairly typical:

2017-12-19 10:27     Test payment OK.
2017-12-19 12:43     Test payment finally visible in the test business account, but IPN still not sent (queued, 0 retry, nothing on ngrok.)
2017-12-19 20:23     IPN finally received.

PayPal Sandbox IPN slow

i.e.: it took close to 10 hours between the test purchase and reception of the first IPN.

Below are some tips.

A normal purchase flow (be it production or Sandbox) goes like this:

  1. You perform a purchase on your own site.
  2. The money gets sent to your merchant account.
  3. The IPN gets sent to your site.

In production: steps 2 and 3 occur typically within minutes of step 1.

But, in the Sandbox environment: step 2 (the balance) often occurs only hours after step 1. Even once step 2 does occur, step 3 (the IPN) still does not occur immediately and it's common to have to wait many hours.

This is all very annoying, of course, and defeats the purposes of a test environment.

To test things are working okay on your end and that it's just "good old" PayPal being miserably slow:

  • Keep an eye on your error logs. No error during your test order?
  • Keep an eye on the Sandbox merchant account to know when the money arrives.
  • Keep an eye on your activity logs to see if you received any notification on the expected URL. (Using ngrok for local development makes this even easier.)
  • Keep an eye on the IPN history page of the Sandbox to know the status of the IPN. In particular:
    • Check the Latest delivery attempt date/time field. As long as it's empty, you cannot blame your own IPN script.

Source: this is based on my using PayPal in production for years and testing using PayPal Sandbox a few times a year. When testing, it was always hard to tell if I'd messed up something (no notification) or if it was just the Sandbox being slow. I ended up timing things out… and it turns out it's just common for notifications to be 5H+ late, or even much more than that.

Bottom-line:

  • Move to a new and better payment gateway, e.g.: Stripe, where the test environment does behave in real-time.
  • If you're stuck with PayPal, simulating IPNs (by submitting your own fake IPNs or old data) might prove more convenient than using the Sandbox, at least when time is critical.