Paypal Account Setup Questions

i've been testing with the paypal sandbox, which has been working well for me with opencart. i have just set up my paypal "website payments standard" account. have a few questions... paypal has a page of "website payments preferences". are these required to make opencart's checkout process work correctly?

for example, there is an option for "auto return" which ask for a return url to be provided.

there is also a "payments data transfer" option, which appears to be what sends the successful payment notification back to the cart.

do i need to touch any of this stuff?

Yes, you need to turn on something called IPN. This will use a function on the opencart to process the cart once the user has paid.

okay, i saw that too, but it asks for a url to send the notification to. this appeared to be transparent to me when testing with the sandbox... i didn't give it a URL. what do i put in here??

from paypal's documentation:

"Alternatively, you can activate IPN by including the notify_url field in your PayPal
button. This field specifies the URL of a script that can process the IPN."

i'm wondering if it really needs to be activated from the paypal side at all...?

Leave it from PayPal's side and everything should be done via the hidden input field. What happens is that PayPal pings that url, then a callback function posts the post data from the form to PayPal, then Paypal returns the following:

response: success or failed
invoice: the opencart invoice id

This then sends through the 'process' function that clears the cart and makes the order 'pending' and marked as paid.

This is the basis for my Protx mod that I'll add soon!

ok, so it sounds like the answer is "no", i don't have to set up anything special on the paypal side

thanks for the info.