Troubleshooting the PayPal Integration

Check your integration status on the Integrations page. Until Mailchimp actually receives data from PayPal, you will see that it's not connected and a red icon. There are a few reasons this may be the case.

Common Issues

• The PayPal account isn't a Premier or Business account.
  One of these account types is required to use the PayPal integration.
• No transactions have occurred since the integration was set up.
  The PayPal integration simply adds customers to your audience once a purchase is made. So for your existing customers, you'll need to import them as you would any other audience. The customers who buy from you in the future, however, will be added automatically via the integration.
• Someone made a purchase but wasn't added to my audience.
  Purchases made through PayPal Express Checkout use a different system than traditional PayPal purchases. Because of this, we can't receive subscriber information or transactions via the integration when a customer makes a purchase through PayPal Express Checkout.
• Incomplete transaction received.
  If you receive the error message "Last message: Incomplete transaction received and ignored," this indicates that one of your PayPal customers placed a recurring order. Currently, this integration doesn't support recurring orders.

• Transactions are being processed through a shopping cart system.
  Each PayPal transaction can have only one notification URL, and most shopping cart systems send a transaction-specific URL to PayPal so you can track payments in the shopping cart program. Unfortunately, this will override the Mailchimp IPN that is set up for the PayPal account. If you are using a shopping cart system, you may want to check out our Integrations Directory to find an integration that can work with your shopping cart system instead. In this section, you'll learn how to see if your shopping cart is setting a notification URL that is overriding the Mailchimp one

  1. Log in to your PayPal Business or Premier account.
  2. Click the Profile icon in the top-right corner and select Profile and settings.
     
  3. From the My Profile page, click My selling tools.
  4. Under the Getting paid and managing my risk heading, click Update next to Instant Payment Notifications.
     
  5. From the Instant Payment Notification page, click the link for your IPN History page.
  6. Click the message ID number for a specific transaction to see the details for that transaction. If the notification URL is not a Mailchimp URL, the information isn't being sent to Mailchimp but to another system.

• There was a problem with the information being sent to Mailchimp.
  Occasionally, information isn't sent from PayPal to Mailchimp as expected. However, you can resend the information by doing the following:

  1. Log in to your PayPal Business or Premier account.
  2. Click the Profile icon in the top-right corner and select Profile and settings.
     
  3. From the My Profile page, click My selling tools.
  4. Under the Getting paid and managing my risk heading, click Update next to Instant Payment Notifications.
     
  5. From the Instant Payment Notification page, click the link for your IPN History page.
  6. Choose the transaction(s) by checking the box to the left of each transaction, and click the option to Resend Selected.