PayPal Bug: Auction IPN

You never want to see anyone have troubles, but it does let me rest a little better when I see a group of developers like those at PayPal make small mistakes. It makes them human. So it appears there is a bug in the PayPal IPN for certain eBay auctions. The PayPal IPN is not passing the business variable to the IPN page. This causes the IPN to fail.

You can keep track of the developments here:
http://www.pdncommunity.com/pdn/board/message?board.id=ipn&message.id=1966

In the meantime, I'm going to create a workaround. PayPal is still passing the receiver_email value properly for these posts. Receiver email is fairly reliable to use as long as they use the Primary email address in their PayPal listings. The business variable is preferred, but I'll do an If/Then with logic as:

If business = "" Then
business = Request.Form("receiver_email")
End If

Hope that helps,

Shannon