When someone buys a Meditation Magazine subscription via PayPal, PayPal sends an IPN (Instant Payment Notification) to WooCommerce. WooCommerce receives the IPN and creates the order & subscription automatically. This triggers a whole stream of automated processes, including sending emails to the subscriber, putting their magazines into the automated fulfillment system, etc.

SOMETIMES IPNS FAIL. Often they get sent by PayPal but WooCommerce doesn’t receive them for some reason.

In this case, you’ll need to re-send the IPN, and check to make sure that it sets up the order & subscription correctly.

The first step is to make sure you know which IPNs actually failed. The simplest way to do this is to export all the subscriptions from PayPal, export all the subscriptions from WooCommerce (or Metorik), and compare the two spreadsheets to find out which subscriptions in PayPal never made it into our WooCommerce system.

If you catch the failed IPNs within 28 days from the date of failure, you can easily resend them.

If you catch them after 28 days, you need to set up the orders & subscriptions manually.

• Here’s a quick (2min) screen recording showing how easy it is to fix the IPNs if you catch them within 28 days
• Here’s Chris’s 14min screen recording (and code snippet) on how to fix them manually