PayPal's IPN solution for businesses without merchant account

The advantage of having a merchant account is that it allows customers to pay without leaving the retailer’s site and there is almost no limit to the ways that a merchant can build specific functionality related to payments that makes business easier for customers and a business.

Yet there is a solution even for those who don’t have a merchant account. Such retailers can avail of PayPal's Instant Payment Notification (IPN) system.

With PayPal IPN merchants' applications receive automated notifications about payment status so that these applications can perform whatever functions are desired when specific payment events occur.

Implementation of IPN system is very simple in light of the fact that PayPal provides sample code for ASP.net, Cold Fusion, Java, Perl and PHP.

The code is extremely straightforward and with minimal modification can serve as a working script.

With a script that deals with all of the possible events that are used with the type of payments that a merchant is accepting and the type of business logic a merchant wants to have performed automatically when payment events occur the amount of manual work is substantially reduced when managing PayPal payments.

Once a script is set up, a merchant needs to tell PayPal where it's located so that it can send the notifications to it.

Implementing PayPal IPN is a great way to automate many activities that PayPal merchants often handle manually and is a decent compromise for merchants not ready to move up to their own merchant accounts.

For merchants looking for a more integrated solution with a complete API similar in nature to those offered by payment gateways and which allows merchants to keep users on their websites throughout the entire order process, PayPal's Website Payments Pro offering is another intermediary solution.