PayPal Invoice API Invoice does not look like Preview

Question

I've been testing Paypal Invoicing API and have successfully sent invoices in the Sandbox through CreateAndSendInvoice from a sandbox business account to a sandbox client account. However the mailed Invoice always appears in text without any button to process the payment through Paypal. So I then went into the sandbox business again and created an invoice and sent to the sandbox client account. The mailed Invoice was also plain text that looked nothing like the preview. How can I send in Sandbox a PayPAl Invoice that looks like the Invoice Preview? How can I send an invoice through the PayPal Invoice API that looks like the preview? Currently the sample text invoice I get looks like this

    
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You've received an invoice
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Hello Client User


Test Store sent you an invoice for $1.10 USD.


View and Pay Invoice
https://www.sandbox.paypal.com/us/cgi_bin/webscr?cmd=_pay-inv&id=INV2-A5ZC-BGK5-JRR5-E58V


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Summary of this invoice
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Sent to: Client USer
[email protected]
Sent from: Test Store
[email protected]
Invoice number: 0003
Date payment is due: Mar 7, 2014
Amount: $1.10 USD



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Help Center: 
https://www.sandbox.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/helpweb?cmd=_help
Security Center: 
https://www.sandbox.paypal.com/us/security

Please don't reply to this email. It'll just confuse the computer that sent it and you won't get a response.

Copyright © 2014 PayPal, Inc. All rights reserved. PayPal is located at 2211 N. First St., San Jose, CA 95131.

PayPal Email ID  PP1557

Drew Angell Drew Angell · Accepted Answer · 2014-02-25T23:26:48

Since you're working with sandbox accounts, it sounds like you must be seeing these emails from the Notifications tab where emails are sent to sandbox accounts..??

I'm pretty sure what you're running into is that the email client used there is limited and actually does see nothing but the text version of those invoices that get sent. If you were to see that same invoice in a better email client it would probably look just fine.

I would recommend logging into the sandbox account of the invoice receiver, and make sure it shows up there in the history like it's supposed to. If it does then it sounds everything worked and would work as expected when you go live and start getting those emails to real email clients.

You could run a final test on the live server and send yourself an invoice to an email account you have (not attached to your PayPal account) for 1.00 or something like that. Then you can see what it actually looks like in your true client.

PayPal Invoice API Invoice does not look like Preview

1 Answers