Thread: PayPal Recurring Payments - Not updating in admin

PayPal Recurring Payments - Not updating in admin

Hi Guys,

I've been doing some test orders to try and understand how the recurring payment system works, after 4 days I'm still not much clearer.

Can someone confirm the correct behaviour because I'm assuming what I'm getting is wrong.

The order goes perfect, the payment is taken, emails are sent and the new listing is in the admin ready to approve. I go to orders and approve, I then go to the listing and publish. Everything seems to be working great at this point, I see an expire date that's correct on the listing admin.

In orders it creates 2 records, one with the current date that says PayPal activated, the next has the expire date and says PayPal pending. I'm assuming this is correct, the first one is paid and the second is when the next payment is due.

This is where the problem happens, I setup a test plan which charged £1 daily, 4 days have gone and every day I've received email confirmation from PayPal and the payment has been received. But the website admin hasn't changed, the dates are still the same on both the orders page and the expire date on the admin listing. The expire day was 3 days ago, yet the listing is still published.

I'm pretty certain I have the PayPal IPN setup correctly, I'm only using the IPN on this one website so it's not a multi site issue. I'm a full time web designer for over 10 years, I know what I'm doing, I've setup PayPal on websites tons of times for clients, so I'm pretty sure it's not just me being an idiot.

So can someone confirm the correct behaviour for this part? I'm assuming that once PayPal takes the payment the next time the Wordpress built in cron runs the website should get that notification. The expire date on the listing admin will update to reflect and in the order section the record that was Pending becomes Activated and a new record is added and Pending for the next date.

And finally, while I'm having this issue, should I go to the order that is Pending and click "Mark as complete"? Is this is the manual version of the same process and it will update the the dates and create a new order for the next expiry date?

Thanks for your time and for the record I've been reading and searching the forums for the last 4 days, nothing really confirmed my questions and doubts.