Can PayPal checkout auto-redirect buyers to their thank-you/download page?

« Return to PayPal Payments Standard Shopping Cart

Buyers who go through the PayPal checkout site will normally need to click a Return to Merchant link at the end of checkout in order to proceed to their E-junkie-generated thank-you/download page.

This is because PayPal can take a bit longer to complete processing a buyer's payment than it takes that buyer to finish checkout, and we depend on receiving IPN (Instant Payment Notification) from PayPal confirming that completed payment and returning the order details we'd use to process the buyer's order. Having buyers click a link to proceed past the end of PayPal checkout stalls them for a bit more time, which helps ensure that we'll have received that IPN and processed their order by the time they arrive at our post-checkout thank-you page, so we can show their download link(s) and other order details there.

While it's possible to enable auto-return manually for PayPal checkout, that would raise the odds of buyers arriving at our thank-you page before we've received IPN from PayPal and processed their order, in which case we could only show the buyer a generic thank-you page asking them to watch their email for further details about their order.

That said, if you are not selling any digital goods—e.g., file downloads, redirections, or digital codes—here's how you can enable auto-return for PayPal checkout:

1. In your PayPal account under [your name] > Account Settings > Website Payments > Website Preferences screen, set Auto-Return: ON and Payment Data Transfer: ON, and provide this Auto-Return URL where indicated:
   https://www.e-junkie.com/d/XXXXXX/rp.php
   (Replace the XXXXXX with your own E-junkie Client ID, which you can find in E-junkie Dashboard under Manage Seller Account > View Account Summary);
2. Also, if you are not redirecting buyers to a Common Thank-you Page URL on your own Web site, then in your E-junkie Dashboard go to Manage Seller Account > Edit Preferences and un-tick the box Wait for pending payments to clear before processing. This will help ensure we can show the buyer's order details on their E-junkie-generated thank-you page after they're auto-redirected, but you may need to watch for any PayPal payments that ultimately fail after the buyer finished checkout.

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