S2Member and PayPal Standard

Okay, I’m new to both s2member and paypal. Here is my question, and this may have been asked before, but you’ll need to dumb it down for me. :-)

We have a site that uses s2member to register paid memberships to access certain parts of the website for “members only.” We also have a section of the website devoted to an online store. Both s2member (as I understand it) and this online shopping cart need an IPN Notification URL in order to receive payments via PayPal and to function properly. However, PayPal only allows one IPN Notification URL.

I don’t really understand the IPN URL vs IPN Notification URL. My understanding, and again I am new to this, is that if I have one IPN Notification URL set up for s2member I won’t be able to receive notifications from the online store. Is this correct? If so, how can both s2member and the online shopping cart work within the same site? or can they not both work? Would this mean that I would have to set up a separate PayPal account in order to get notifications on the shopping cart portion?

Any guidance you can provide would be helpful. This is a non-profit business that would like both an online membership system and an online shopping cart, both using the same PayPal account. If this isn’t possible, how do others do it?

Thanks in advance for your time!

Paypal only has one setting for the IPN Notifications – TRUE.

However, Paypal also understands that this situation occurs and it can use \”override notification urls\” passed to it by payment and subscription buttons.

S2member automatically adds their notification urls to the paypal buttons generated through the s2member system.

So, you should be able to set the Paypal IPN Notification URL to your shopping cart if you need to and s2member will send an \”override notification url\” for any transactions originating through their system.

Under S2Member -> Paypal Options -> PayPal IPN Integration, if you click the \”more information\” link you get this text:

*Quick Tip* In addition to the default IPN settings inside your PayPal® account, the IPN URL is also set on a per-transaction basis by the special PayPal® Button Code that s2Member provides you with. In other words, if you have multiple sites operating on one PayPal® account, that\’s OK. s2Member dynamically sets the IPN URL for each transaction. The result is that the IPN URL configured from within your PayPal® account, becomes the default, which is then overwritten on a per-transaction basis. In fact, PayPal® recently updated their system to support IPN URL preservation. One PayPal® account can handle multiple sites, all using different IPN URLs.

Hope that helps.

Dave

Dave,

Thanks for the response. I did read the quick tip under PayPal integration and I had a hard time following it. Again, I\’m a noob.

Just to clarify, as long as I set up the paypal buttons correctly in s2member and use the shortcode provided (I believe it is called shortcode) as opposed to the long code that has the warning about there might be added, I should be golden as far as the override notification url. That way I can use the shopping cart notification URL as you stated in your response.

Is that correct? Thanks so much for the quick response to my original question.

Yes, s2member should generate the code to override the url saved in your paypal account for it\’s own purchases.

The shortcode will be in brackets [ shortcode info here…. ].

Dave