To start receiving payments for your tickets using PayPal with any of our e-commerce options, you’ll need to enable Instant Payment Notification (IPN) on your PayPal account and connect the account to your WordPress site.

👋 Please note you will need a PayPal Business account to be able to configure Instant Payment Notification. You may also want a sandbox IPN Simulator to test your site settings and transactions.

At this time, PayPal does not currently support free tickets. In order to create free tickets, you’ll need to upgrade to Event Tickets Plus and use WooCommerce.

Configuring PayPal IPN

First, log into your PayPal business account and navigate to Account Settings.

From there, go select the Notifications option under Business Profile. Look for Instant payment notifications and click the “Update” link.

Instant Payment Notification (IPN) settings page, click Choose IPN Settings.

Enter your site’s address in the Notification URL field and choose Receive IPN messages (Enabled). Save your settings.

Your current IPN settings should look like the following:

IPN screen showing the current settings options that were selected in the previous steps.

Next, navigate back to your Account Settings page, and go to the Website payments preferences under Products & Services. This is where the settings to redirect users after making a purchase are located.

Then, add the order confirmation link in Auto return to bring users back to your website after they submit their purchase. Your Auto return link depends on the checkout page created using Tribe Commerce, WooCommerce, or Easy Digital Downloads. After you’ve entered the URL for your confirmation page, hit Enter (return) on your keyboard, or click Save.

Then, directly below this section enable Payment data transfer to receive payment notifications.

Not sure where to find your cart page? You can find it in the settings of the e-commerce plugin used on your site. You can also look for “Cart” on the Pages screen of the WordPress admin.

See PayPal’s Developer IPN guide and review IPN order history for further help.

Tickets Commerce

To start collecting payments with Tickets Commerce, simply head to Tickets > Settings > Payments and toggle on the Enable Tickets Commerce button.

Tickets > Settings > Payments
Tickets > Settings > Payments

Next, click on the blue button to Connect Automatically with PayPal.

You’ll see a pop-up to log in to your PayPal account. Don’t worry if you don’t have one; you can also register for a PayPal account by following the prompts in the pop-up as well.

You can always refer back to your Payments tab to check your connection status to PayPal at any time.

See this article for more information on using Tickets Commerce.

WooCommerce

👋 Selling tickets to your events with WooCommerce requires Event Tickets Plus.

If you are using WooCommerce with PayPal, you’ll need to configure the PayPal IPN as well. Refer to WooCommerce’s documentation to get that set up.

For optimal functionality with Event Tickets Plus, we recommend that you check Enable stock management under WooCommerce Settings Products Inventory.

To bring users back to your site, configure your checkout page and use this link in the Auto return field on the PayPal Website payment preferences screen.

WooCommerce Checkout page settings can be found in WooCommerceSettingsAdvanced

Check out our guide on using WooCommerce with Event Tickets Plus for more detailed instructions on WooCommerce settings.

Easy Digital Downloads

👋 Selling tickets to your events with Easy Digital Downloads requires Event Tickets Plus.

If you are using Easy Digital Downloads with PayPal, you’ll need to configure the PayPal IPN as well. Create your checkout page, then refer to Easy Digital Download’s documentation to get that set up.

Easy Digital DownloadsSettingsPayment Gateways

Tribe Commerce

Note: Tribe Commerce is our legacy e-commerce solution and is no longer included on new installs with Event Tickets. See the above section on Tickets Commerce instead.

After a successful PayPal order, users will be redirected to the page you designate as the Success Page in your Tribe Commerce settings (TicketsSettingsPayments). You can designate any page in your site by selecting one from the dropdown menu.

In order for your users to receive their order information on the success page, you will need to copy and paste the [tribe-tpp-success] shortcode into the content of your success page and use the link for it your Auto return settings in PayPal.

Congratulations! You are now ready to receive payments for your tickets in your PayPal account and your clients will be automatically redirected to your success page after completing a purchase.

Troubleshooting PayPal issues

If you are just getting started or having issues with PayPal, here are a few common areas to test.

  • Are attendees not generating or are you missing orders from PayPal? Check your PayPal IPN history.
  • Recheck your checkout and confirmation page settings in your e-commerce settings and on PayPal’s Auto return and Payment data transfer.
  • Using PDT and IPN at the same time has resulted in conflicts. IPN is generally the preferred setting.
  • Use an email logging plugin like WP Mail Logging to see all emails your website is sending. Look for payments in PayPal and compare it to the emails sent to attendees.
  • If attendees are not being generated at the expected order status changes, it’s possible the cron jobs are not running. You can manually trigger the cron jobs to run by visiting the following url on the site: [SITE_URL]/wp-cron.php
  • In some cases, if the Paypal confirmation is not received, the attendees don’t get generated. In this case, go to the WooCommerce Order edit page and click Regenerate Attendees in the Order actions dropdown.
  • Check for other Common Ticket Stock Issues.