PayPal IPNs failing

[ShopSite David]

Beginning about September 12th 2012 merchants started receiving emails from PayPal that IPNs they are sending to ShopSite thankyou.cgi or proipn.cgi are failing. On these dates PayPal completed a transition of their servers to a new server farm, and changes on their new servers cause the IPN validation request to their servers from ShopSite to not return any results, so that ShopSite cannot validate (and will therefore not accept) the IPN notification. Shortly after this problem was encountered PayPal implemented a temporary fix that is due to expire on October 22, 2012. You have the following options for a permanent fix.

* If you are running v11 sp2 r4 - you have the latest release which includes the patches so nothing more needs to be done.
* If you are running v11 sp2 r3 - patches have been released for thankyou.cgi and proipn.cgi and need to be applied for stores hosted on Linux, FreeBSD, or Windows Server operating systems
* If you are running v11 sp2 r2 or an earlier version of ShopSite, are using PayPal Standard and if you have access to your store's ShopSite Data Directory, you can edit the file named 'paypal.aa' in that directory and change the following line:

ACGI: cgi-bin/webscr

to:

ACGI: /cgi-bin/webscr

Note the addition of the forward slash '/' before cgi-bin. This second solution will resolve the PayPal Standard issue AND the previous orders 'missing' from ShopSite should eventually appear in your ShopSite because PayPal will periodically retry sending the IPNs until they are accepted.

The only solution for PayPal Express users is to apply the patch for v11 sp2 r3 or upgrade to v11 sp2 r4. However, unlike PayPal Standard, Express users will have the order go through despite the IPN failure email. In cases where payment approval is delayed as for an eCheck, ShopSite will always report the payment as pending since the IPN is not being sent by PayPal.

To upgrade to v11 sp2 r4 or to obtain the patches to v11 sp2 r3 contact your ShopSite reseller

Merchants that are no longer hosted with a ShopSite partner can contact ShopSite by using this form: http://www.shopsite.com/help/contact/info.html

For more information see knowledgebase article:
http://support.shopsite.com/KBase/questions/2548/