Notifications Merchants Receive

 

How You Are Notified of New Activity for Your Subscriptions

You can get Notifications for your Subscriptions in four ways:

l

email

l	history transaction log

l	downloadable history transaction log

l	IPN (if you have activated it)

Emails

You will receive an email notification in the following cases:

l	Successful Sign-up

l	Cancellation

l	Successful Payments

l	Scheduled Payment Failures

If you do not want to receive payment notifications via email, go to the Profile subtab of the My Account tab and select the Notifications link from the left-hand menu. Find the Payment Notifications heading and clear the I receive PayPal Website Payments and Instant Purchase checkbox, and then click Save.

History

Your history transaction log (“History”) contains information about your Subscriptions.

You may see some of the following terms in the Type column of your History:

l	Subscription Creation

l	Subscription Cancellation

l

Payment

l	Subscription Completion

Payment failures are not recorded by a separate line in your History. However, the Subscription Details page will note that a payment failed, and, if another attempt is scheduled, the date of the next attempt.

 

The Status column of subscription creation entry may contain the following terms:

l	Active: There are future scheduled payments for this subscription.

l	Cancelled: The subscription has been cancelled. No future payments will be made.

l	Completed: All payments for this subscription have been made.

Note:

When you download your subscriber log, the Completed and Cancelled statuses will be pre-pended with active or inactive (e.g. active-completed or inactive-cancelled). This indicates whether the end of the term for the cancelled or completed subscription has been reached.

Downloadable Logs

To download all of the Subscription-related entries in your History, you will need to download two files. First, login to your PayPal account, go to the History subtab of the My Account tab, and choose the Download Log link in the Quick Links menu.

Download Payment History

Click the All Transactions radio button or enter the dates of the entries you want to download, choose the type of file you would like to download (Comma delimited, Tab delimited, Quicken, or QuickBooks), and click the Download History button. This file will contain all of your Subscriptions-related payments.

Download Subscriber List

Click the All Transactions radio button or enter the dates of the entries you want to download, choose the Subscriptions radio button, which will only appear after someone has subscribed to your service, and click the Download History button. This file will contain all of your non-payment Subscriptions-related entries (Sign-Ups, Cancellations, and Completions).

For a list of all past and current subscribers, filter out Subscription Cancellation and Subscription Completion Transactions.

For a list of active subscribers (i.e. a list of all subscribers whose end of term has not yet been reached), sort for transactions with a status of active, active-completed, or active-cancelled.

 

IPN

To learn more about IPN, see the PayPal Integration Guide, which is available to view and download from the PayPal website.

If you have Instant Payment Notifications activated, you will receive an IPN on:

l	Successful Sign-up

l	Cancellation

l	Successful Payments

l	Scheduled Payment Failures

l	End of Term

For details about IPN variables related to subscriptions, see Appendix A, “IPN Subscriptions Variables.”

End of Term

End of Term is one way to help you manage password access to your Subscriptions content. For more help with password management, please refer to the Password Management section of this document, which begins on page 41.

An End of Term IPN is sent when a subscription ends, so you can cancel the subscriber’s access to your subscription content.

If your subscription is not recurring, the End of Term will be sent when the Subscription is completed. If your subscription is recurring and it is manually cancelled, the End of Term will be sent at the end of the current term. If your subscription is recurring and it automatically cancelled due to payment failure, the End of Term will be sent immediately.

Example 8.1

End of Term Examples

l	Term: $10 USD for 6 months

l	End of Term sent: six months after sign-up

l	Term: $9.99 USD per month. Paid on the 1st.

l	Cancellation: manual, on Sept. 15th

l	End of Term sent: On Oct. 1st

l	Term: $10 USD for 6 months

l	Cancellation: payment failure, on Sept.8th

l	End of Term sent: on Sept. 8th