How do you know when a PayPal cart has been abandoned?

Question

I am using PayPal Website Payments Standard to accept payments on an online store. Currently when customers are sent to PayPal, we assume their orders are abandoned until we get an IPN response from PayPal telling us differently.

Looking through PayPal's IPN documentation, it doesn't look like there is a notification for abandoned carts. The only other way I could think to do this would be to initially mark an order as pending and then have some kind of service that runs periodically to mark old, uncompleted orders as abandoned.

Is there a better way to do this? Is there a documented maximum expiration time for a payment request?

Answer 1

PayPal does not have any notification that would be triggered by an interrupted checkout. From what I've seen in a few carts they use "Pending" or "Awaiting confirmation" status while awaiting IPN.

IPN (as its payment notification is called) is triggered by payment related events only. If the cart gets abandoned their payment will not have been made. So, there is nothing to notify about.

There is no reliable mechanism to get abandonment data.

If you're using PayPal Express Checkout, token life is 3 hours (unless changed on request). So, it's safe to mark a payment "abandoned" after this time.