Invoicing Pro can currently only process debit and credit card payments. You can accept those payments via PayPal by following these steps:
- Install and activate the Invoice Pro extension.
- Go to Jetpack CRM > CRM Settings > Payments.
- In the “Accept Payment via” option, select “PayPal” from the dropdown list. Scroll down and click the “Save Settings” button, which will refresh the page with the PayPal options.
- In the “Live or sandbox” option, select:
- “Live” from the dropdown list to accept live payments; or
- “Sandbox” from the dropdown list to test payments with your PayPal sandbox
- In the “Your PayPal Business Email” option, enter the email address for your PayPal Business account.
- Optional: If using the PayPal Sandbox option, in the “Your PayPal Sandbox Business Email” option, enter the email address for your PayPal Sandbox Business account. Your PayPal Sandbox Business email address will be different from your PayPal Business email.
- Click the “Save Settings” button.
Those settings enable your invoices to be paid online via PayPal. However, you also need to enable IPN in PayPal so that Jetpack CRM can process transactions and automatically mark invoices as paid.
The Invoice Pro “Pay with PayPal” button has the notify_url set so that PayPal knows where to post the notification of a successful payment. However this will not happen if you don’t have IPN enabled in your PayPal Account.
If you don’t enable IPN in PayPal, the payment will still go through, but you’ll need to manually update the invoice status and create the transaction via PayPal. We highly recommend enabling IPN so that Invoicing Pro handles the transaction logging and assigning that transaction/payment to the invoice.
Enabling PayPal IPN
The PayPal user interface changes frequently and varies in different countries and languages. Because of that, we recommend following PayPal’s instructions on setting up IPN notifications.
It doesn’t matter what enter as the “Notification URL” in those PayPal settings, as Invoicing Pro will override this with its own URL.
The important thing is to make sure you have enabled IPN messages to be sent with the “Receive IPN messages (Enabled)” setting.
Frequently Asked Questions
How can I test the PayPal setup before making it live?
We have not built in sandbox mode for a couple of reasons. First, the IPN in sandbox mode isn’t as reliable as in live mode. Additionally, it takes a while for IPN notifications to come through in sandbox mode and often this may be mistakenly seen as the extension not working as advertised.
Why am I not seeing IPN notifications in live mode?
Despite the instant payment notification (IPN) name, they’re not always instant. Sometimes it can take a bit of time for the notification to come through. However, it may be that there’s an issue with the delivery of the IPN.
To see whether this is the case, head over to your PayPal IPN History page to view the status of your IPNs. If they show as “queued”, then it’s just PayPal being slow. The notifications should come through after more time has passed.
If they show as “retrying” then something has gone wrong with the PayPal hander. While we haven’t had this issue in our tests, it may be possible other plugins could interfere, so always test using a default WordPress theme like Twenty-Twenty and with other plugins deactivated (expect the Jetpack CRM plugin + its extensions). If you still see problems after testing on a standard install, please open a support ticket.
PayPal has more details about IPN notifications.
I don’t have PayPal. How can I use this extension?
Invoicing Pro offers PayPal and Stripe as payment gateways. If you don’t have PayPal the other option available to you is our Stripe integration.
If you don’t use PayPal or Stripe, you may want to consider using WooCommerce to process orders and payments.