account always buyer completed current don finally full gross help ignore ipn item multiple note number options order orders page particular payment paypal received sales send states taking times transaction transactions weird

I am trying to decipher the e-junkie logs in order to get our accounting in order. I am getting stumped on the payment statuses. In particular, the "Canceled_Reversal" status baffles me. We have two of these for the year. Both were from Paypal. The first was from a disputed order that the buyer eventually agreed he meant to make, so the order completed. The second was a from a disputed order where the item got lost in the mail, so Paypal found in favor of the buyer and rejected the order. What baffles me is that the Amount for both transactions remained positive, as if we received funds for both. That is not the case. So, what does "Canceled_Reversal" actually mean? It seems to have two completely separate meanings given these two transactions: 1) The transaction was canceled and reversed, and 2) The transaction reversal itself was canceled. I would expect at least one of these two options to NOT have a full Amount accounted for. (i.e. How could our gross sales include an amount that was reversed?)

While I'm on the topic of payment statuses, do you have a help page that explains all of them? I could not find one.

The payment status we log is simply whatever status the payment processor reported when notifying us about the buyer's payment, so you can look up payment status terminology in PayPal help (or Google Checkout help, etc.).

A status of Reversed would indicate just that, the payment was reversed from PayPal's end, usually due to a dispute. A status of Canceled_Reversal would indicate the Reversal itself was canceled, so the order should go through and you would wind up receiving that payment after all. Perhaps that "lost in the mail" order finally arrived after all, so the buyer retracted their dispute and canceled the payment reversal they'd been awarded? If you don't think you really received any funds for that transaction, we would suggest taking the matter up with PayPal support.

Paypal support says the last status they sent out was "Reversed" for that transaction. For some reason e-junkie didn't get the update. =/

If we did not get the update from PayPal for that transaction what you may want to do is see if you can resend it. In your PayPal account you should be able to find the transaction by going to History > IPN HIstory and then you can choose to resend the data to us.

Looks like the IPN history search only goes back 28 days, and the transaction in question happened in July. Oh well. I'll just make a manual note of it.

When it comes to notifying about reversals/canceled reverals, PayPal IPN is buggy and send notifications in weird orders and multiple times (not duplicates, which are easy to ignore).

We try our best to maintain the latest state of the transaction, but unless PayPal fixes the IPNs associated with reversals, there is always a chance of us not having the most current state of the transaction.

Yeah that particular transaction went through a number of different states as it was disputed, countered, re-disputed, re-countered, etc. I'm not surprised that something ended up funky really.