PayPal standard IPN chargeback settlement message missing required 'business' field

1
votes

We've been using PayPal standard for about 10 years now. Only today we've received an IPN message generated as a result of chargeback settlement - and noticed some fields are missing.

Here are the fields as confirmed in the PayPal IPN history page (for privacy reasons, the 'payer_email' field value is obscured):

txn_type=adjustment&payment_date=03:32:10 Feb 09, 2016 PST&payment_gross=&mc_currency=CAD&verify_sign=ATjxb9PR1aNXqPs2fhQE00D26f.QAu0.eUdqXZNZvOMDQsa1Hd3cSPz8&payer_status=verified&[email protected]&txn_id=14V55619FE764784J&parent_txn_id=1XH95106BE741351U&payer_id=W2PJ5ZGY8E9VG&invoice=673D082E-D1F9-4D22-A535-6494F679CDCE&reason_code=chargeback_settlement&payment_status=Completed&payment_fee=-20.00&mc_gross=-300.00&charset=UTF-8&notify_version=3.8&ipn_track_id=7ecc9a13ccaa0

From what I see, the expected "business" field is missing. See the IPN reference at https://developer.paypal.com/docs/classic/ipn/integration-guide/IPNandPDTVariables/:

Email address or account ID of the payment recipient (that is, the merchant). Equivalent to the values of receiver_email (if payment is sent to primary account) and business set in the Website Payment HTML.

This 'business' field was always in all the other IPN messages (even those for refunds), and our app relies on its value to identify the correct merchant.

Anyone else experienced this issue? (To me it looks like a PayPal IPN bug.)

1
paypalpaypal-ipnmissing-data

1 Answers

0
votes

The IPN you got for the chargeback includes a parent_txn_id which is the txn_id from the original payment that is being disputed.

So in your system you should be able to relate this IPN back to that one based on that original txn_id, and in that original order data you would be able to see the "business" parameter associated with it.