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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-29T07:13:27+00:00

Does anyone have an opinion on the best approach to take when building a

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Does anyone have an opinion on the best approach to take when building a signup process that incorporates PayPal subscription. There are a couple of issues that I would like to take into account:

First: I have an initial form to capture the users details. I then store the detail in an MYSQL database and use the new account_id and pass it through to PayPal to reference the account that is choosing the subscription. Lets say the user then decides to cancel the payment, I now have am account in the database without any sort of subscription associated to it.

If the user was then to try and sign up again the form would indicate that the user is already signed up. Would it be worth deleting the user on cancel or should I use some sort of temporary table to store the account information up to the point where the subscription is confirmed.

Second: There is a slight delay between PayPal IPN reaching the server and and the user arriving back after signing up to a package. Should I place a holding page to ask the user to wait for the response from the PayPal IPN or is there some other standard method of dealing with this issue?

Thanks

Oliver

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  1. Editorial Team

    Both of your methods would work, but to get the best bang for your buck from PayPal’s order management functionality, I would advise using three methods. IPN, PDT, and the TransactionSearch API.

    Pro’s and Con’s:

    1. IPN does have a delay, PDT does not. However, IPN is pretty much guaranteed to be sent.
    2. PDT is not guaranteed because it depends on your buyers being redirected back to your site, which is only automatic for PayPal members. However, because of this, PDT
    3. TransactionSearch would need to be initiated by you; so you could put it on a timer after someone is sent to PayPal, and have it check every few minutes, or after ten minutes, or have the API call triggered upon a visitor accessing a certain page.

    With all of these, and some ingenuity, there is no possible way your buyer would notice a delay in signup, but you would have a lot going in the background.

    A good source for order automation can be found on PayPal’s Merchant Tech support’s support center here.

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