CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I am using PayPal Pro as a payment processor and I need some help figuring out how civi records the PayPal fee and stores it in the database.

Currently, if you pay using your PayPal account, the fees are recorded in the database and show in the contribution records. But if you pay by credit card, the fees are not recorded (the database shows null) and the contribution page of course show nothing for the fee amount.

I have done some forum scouring and found some information on the PayPal IPN (and using mc_fee, this post for instance http://forum.civicrm.org/index.php/topic,16284.msg69540.html#msg69540). But none of what I have read do far has helped me get the fee to come thru a credit card trnx.

Any help would be greatly appreciated as I'd hate to have to force that field to be editable and manually enter fees.

I have reproduced this on my site. Looking more closely at the transactions (and the IPNs thereof), it appears that for:

recurring transactions (eg. &txn_type=recurring_payment ) - Payment Fee is logged
express checkout transactions (eg. &txn_type=express_checkout) - Payment fee is logged
"normal" transactions (eg. &txn_type=web_accept ) - Payment Fee is NOT logged 

In all three cases, paypal sends the gross amount via mc_gross and payment_gross, and the fee amount via mc_fee and payment_fee. Looking at PayPalProIPN.php, CiviCRM is looking at mc_fee and mc_gross, and never checks the other two. CiviCRM has special code written to handle IPNs with "&txn_type=recurring_payment" but I cannot find anything to explain why &txn_type=express_checkout and &txn_type=web_accept should elicit different behaviors than each-other, since neither appears anywhere in the code.

I have attempted to reproduce this on the demo site, but I can't seem to coax it to accept the provided sandbox credit card number (it keeps spitting up "10001: Internal Error The transaction could not be loaded") - so if anyone wants to try that, more power to them. Still, this is looking like an actual bug, though I have no idea what the problem actually is.

I'm not familiar w/ that code, and I'm a bit confused by the terms. What's the difference between mc_fee and payment_fee? Is this related to the original poster's distinction between a transaction using a PayPal account vs. a credit card?

If indeed payment_fee is 'name' used in the IPN's for a fee that needs to be logged by CiviCRM - it doesn't seem to be handled at all in either PayPalIPN.php or PayPalProIPN.php - and hence this is a bug. Would be great if you could nail this down, implement a fix, and file an issue w/ a patch on the issue tracker.

Dave - in this context, there seems to be no difference between mc_fee and payment_fee - they contain the exact same information in all the IPNs I have looked at. I apologize if I have confused matters a bit by referring to payment fee the generic piece of information (which both variables convey) in my last post with almost the same name as one of the variables (payment_fee).

That said, there is still a bug, which I will state here and add to the issue tracker, though I currently have no idea how to fix it:

When processing PaypalPro IPNs, CiviCRM does not record the value of mc_gross (the processing fee) for transactions where &txn_type=web_accept. I have not been able to find any reason in code for this to be the case, as it does record mc_gross when &txn_type=express_checkout, which triggers, to all appearances, the same process.

I'm adding my two cents that I would really appreciate this fix. I spend a fair amount of time reconciling our Civi donation records with our Paypal payment records, and it would make things much easier to be able to see in Civi the accurate fee and net amount.

I don't have any programming skills but am happy to help test a fix.

Sure. My experience is similar to previous posters. We use PayPal Pro, which offers donors the option to enter a credit card payment on our contribution page, or to "check out with PayPal" by logging into his/her PayPal account and making a payment from there. When a donor makes a payment from his/her PayPal account, Civi records the accurate total amount, fee amount, and net amount.

If a donor makes a contribution by entering a credit card on our contribution page, Civi displays the accurate total amount, shows the fee amount as blank, and displays the net amount as the same as the total (i.e. no fee amount is removed from the net amount). But of course PayPal has taken their cut of these donations, which I can see if I log into my PayPal account.

if i had to guess, most likely paypal is using two diffferent variable names for fee / net amount for Pro vs Standard

what i would do is:

1. Log the $_REQUEST variables in both IPN files (immediately after civi bootstrap)

2. Do a test (or real) payment in both Pro and Standard

see what paypal sends back

thanx

lobo

once civi is bootstrapped the best way is:

CRM_Core_Error::debug_var( 'REQUEST', $_REQUEST );

lobo

stoob:

might be easiest if you ping me on IRC and we can get this sorted

the code probably should go here:

extern/ipn.php

immediately after:

$config = CRM_Core_Config::singleton();

lobo