move from Paypal IPN/PDT to REST API

How do we change the paypal gateway setup from IPN/PDT to REST API?

The REST API isn't a replacement for IPN/PDT. It's a replacement for the NVP/SOAP API. We've a rewrite scheduled for the PayPal gateway into the REST API for a future release. Are you having any issues that'd require this?

We've been having serious issues with receipt of DPT and IPN notifications resulting in subscriptions being renewed when they hadn't expired, especially recurring ones; we have successfully converted our shopping cart Paypal Gateway from IPN to REST

You can't convert from IPN. IPN is how PayPal notifies your site that a payment is complete. This all works with our current implementation. If your site isn't receiving IPNs then either your site is blocking them in some way or PayPal isn't configured properly. PDT is just a site return where PayPal redirects the user back to the payment complete page and does not happen for recurring payments.

The Rest API is not a replacement for IPNs. Webhooks are a replacement for IPNs and functionally are the same thing. We've a rewrite scheduled for this year though. Likely as a separate gateway so we can leave the existing untouched for backwards compatibility.

Hi Kyle.

Pete's given me his login so I can add to the discussion, I've been working with him on the society's website over the last few months. I've a bit of experience with Wordpress but new to Joomla so it's been a bit of a learning curve.

We discovered that for a considerable period there had been duplicate Paypal payments made by subscribers, both recurring and one off. On investigation this was because CB wasn't recognising payments had been made so subscribers were logging in, seeing that their subscription was still expired and re-subscribing, sometimes multiple times. 

We followed the instructions here regarding careful input of the merchant ID, Identity token etc and discovered that the identity tokens did not match. We updated that and things seemed to improve, however we are still getting sporadic failures. For example today we had a manual renewal which failed with a log type of "PDT notification not authenticating at payment gateway". All recent successful payments have an "IPN" log type.

Any help would be gratefully appreciated 

(A secondary question is regards to the NVP/SOAP API. Paypal's developer site says "In 2026, PayPal will phase out Website Payments Standard (WPS), with processing ending in January 2027. The NVP/SOAP API will also be retired soon after." Presumably the Paypal gateway will support REST API by then?)

Thanks

Stephen

For example today we had a manual renewal which failed with a log type of "PDT notification not authenticating at payment gateway".

That's due to PDT verification failing. There should be more information about why in the CBSubs history log. That's a log type of "L". You should see the code for that in handlePaypalPDT. That should only happen if PayPal itself reported back a failed payment. So PayPal is denying that payment. I'd suggest checking with PayPal regarding that and providing the transaction id in the PDT information logged with the PDT notification.

All recent successful payments have an "IPN" log type.

As long as IPN is successful there should never really be an issue as the IPN will pay the basket.

(A secondary question is regards to the NVP/SOAP API. Paypal's developer site says "In 2026, PayPal will phase out Website Payments Standard (WPS), with processing ending in January 2027. The NVP/SOAP API will also be retired soon after." Presumably the Paypal gateway will support REST API by then?)

NVP/SOAP API is deprecated. It's not removed. It's still fully functional and will continue to be. WPS is a different PayPal payment method not related to either.

REST API is their latest implementation that we'll be supporting by end of this year. I've bumped it up in my priority list and ideally will start investigating work on it sometime next week.