Does paypal provide real-time verification?

I've been accepting Visa, MC, Amex - might add Paypal?

[wayzel]

Hello,

My site requires that I receive a near real-time response telling me whether the funds/credit card are valid or not. Basically I run an authorization first, and then about 10 seconds later I 'capture' the funds (some people call this a post-auth.)

How does Paypal work in this regard? If I wanted to have it added to my custom checkout solution, I would need to somehow get an ok of sorts back from Paypal, something along the lines of "yes, we received your sales request, so go ahead and let this guy take his goods/services from you."

Any input from you Paypal heads out there?

[Agitprop]

PayPal isn't like a normal CC gateway and they don't even verify the AVS or CVV data, so they can notify you much later (usually after you have shipped) that the transaction was fraudulent. Be very wary of using their services.

[digitalv]

Check out NETeller instead of PayPal ... if you're looking to add a unified payment service, they're much more secure and provide a 100% no charge-back guarantee to merchants - so you know it's ALWAYS safe to ship your products out when they pay with NETeller.

[Raymond]

Agitprop, paypal does verify CVV, but that really besides the point.

Paypal does not provide real time notification. IPN is what paypal uses to notify your server if the transaction was completed and it takes less than 10 seconds to up to 10 hours (happened to me recently) for the IPN to arrive.

For me, there are FAR less chargebacks from paypal transaction than credit card transactions. I get an average of 1 chargeback out of 1000+ paypal transactions.

[PayPalPB]

Yes, IPN is what you want. It's a near real-time call-back from the PayPal server to your server telling you that a payment has been completed. It typically goes out less than 3 seconds after the payment but very occasionally gets delayed.

[wayzel]

Thanks guys. The problem is that we provide an 'instant' service (similar to a digital download or a dial-up ISP service) without shipping, so the real-time response is very important to us. Our Verisign gateway replies within a few seconds.

How often is that IPN or whatever you call it delayed. Some of you mentioned it can take hours? Does that happen often? Is it 1%, 25% of the time?

Agitop, merchant accounts have the same fraud weaknesses. They too can tell you months later that the transaction was fraudulent.

I don't know, I guess I always thought of Paypal as the less professional solution, but all the stuff I've been reading on these boards makes me think I should add it as a payment option.

[Raymond]

That 10 hours IPN only happened once. It was about 2 weeks ago.

99.9% of the time the IPN arrives within the first few seconds after completion of a payment.

This is just from my experience with paypal. Others may have different opinions on this.