Ignition PayPal Gateway v0.5.0

PayPal takes a processing fee out of every payment, and until now your site had no idea how much. This release asks PayPal, the moment a payment completes, what it actually settled — the fee PayPal kept, the amount it worked from, and on a split pledge the cut it passed to your platform — and records those figures against the payment. The fee then shows up on the pledge page, comes off every net figure, and fills the Processing Fee column in your exports.

New Features

• PayPal reports what it settled — Every completed PayPal payment now carries PayPal’s own settlement figures, read from PayPal rather than estimated on your site. The fee varies with the payer’s country, their funding source and your PayPal pricing, so the only trustworthy number is the one PayPal reports back. See What PayPal keeps.

• The fee appears where you read the money — The pledge page in wp-admin gains a Processing (gateway) line in its Where it went table; the net for a PayPal pledge has the fee taken off wherever an admin or a creator reads it; and pledge exports fill in the Processing Fee column beside the net. A pledge PayPal has not reported a fee for leaves the cell empty rather than claiming a fee of zero. This is also why a fully refunded PayPal pledge settles at a small negative net — see When a refund leaves you below zero.

• A recovery check for settlements PayPal never reported — Reading the settlement figures is a separate call to PayPal, and a network blip can lose it without affecting the payment itself. A background check now runs twice a day, picks up recent payments that still have no figures, and fills them in. See When PayPal cannot be reached.

Improvements

• Settings headings match the rest of wp-admin — The Live and Sandbox group headings on the PayPal settings screen now use core’s shared heading style rather than PayPal’s own copy of it, so they line up with every other Ignition settings screen.

Bug Fixes

• A refund that arrived before its payment — If PayPal’s payment notification never reached your site but a refund for that same payment did, the pledge stayed pending and neither the payment nor the refund appeared in any total. A refund is proof PayPal took the money, so the payment is now settled first and the refund recorded against it.

Developer

• Settlement seams — The add-on answers core’s per-attempt and per-pledge processing-fee seams, the pledge-net seam, the pledge settlement-terms seam, the operator-custody seam and the projected-charge-context seam. Presence is a marker, not a value: a payment whose breakdown has been read answers even a genuine zero, while one that has never been read answers nothing. See the PayPal developer reference.

• Scheduled event — igcf_paypal_settlement_sweep runs on the twicedaily schedule, is registered on load when missing, and is cleared on deactivation and uninstall. See Scheduled events.

• Platform-fee reconciliation — On a split capture the add-on compares the platform fee PayPal reported settling against the fee the order asked for and writes a diagnostic to the PHP error log when they differ. Nothing is corrected; money PayPal has already settled cannot be moved from here.

• Storage — The add-on’s own table gains its settlement columns and its storage version moves to 6. The upgrade runs automatically.

Compatibility

• Now requires Ignition Crowdfunding 0.22.0 — This release reads and answers core’s settlement seams, which 0.22.0 introduces, and its settings-screen headings render a shared component that ships in core’s admin styles from the same version. The add-on refuses to start on an older core and tells you to update.