PayPal IPN (Instant Payment Notification) is a server-to-server communication tool that PayPal provides which sends POST data to a URL that you specify any time a transaction occurs with your PayPal account. This allows you to automate procedures like updating your own database, sending out custom branded email notifications, updating social platforms, etc. when such transactions are processed.

PayPal IPN for WordPress is a plugin that turns your WordPress site into a listener for PayPal IPN notifications. The plugin provides a simple dashboard where you can view all of the IPN’s that have been sent to it, and it also provides hooks so that you can trigger your own functions accordingly. All of the IPN transaction data will be available to you within your function(s), which gives you the power to automate pretty much anything you need to based on PayPal transaction data.

The plugin is free, and if you’re an experienced developer you can use it to build out any integration / automation you need. The plugin is also used as a foundation to premium extensions where we build in some automation tools and additional functionality you can use without building it out yourself.

PayPal IPN for WordPress - Forwarder

Our most popular premium extension for this plugin is our IPN Forwarder. This allows you to forward IPN data received by our plugin to any number of additional URLs you need this data sent to.

This is extremely useful because PayPal’s system only allows you to configure a single URL to use as an IPN listener, and this becomes a problem when you are using a variety of online services that each require you to setup PayPal IPN specifically for it. Using our PayPal IPN Forwarder plugin you can set your WordPress site as the primary listener for PayPal to send notifications to, and then create forwarding rules so that the IPN data gets sent out to any additional URLs you need. For example, you might be using the following plugins together on a single website:

* WooCommerce w/ PayPal Standard Integration
* GravityForms w/ PayPal Payments
* Shipping / Fulfillment services

If you were running each of these things, and each required the use of PayPal IPN, only one of the three would function properly. With the use of our IPN Forwarder, though, you can set your WordPress site as the primary URL, and forward the data to the additional URL’s required for each service to work as expected.

PayPal IPN for WordPress - MailChimp

Another premium extension we currently have available is for MailChimp. This plugin simply allows you to configure IPN listener so that it will automatically add email address from PayPal transactions into your MailChimp mailing list.