Beware the PayPal eCheque

The last 24 hours at WalkLakes have been a bit of an exciting ride. On the plus side yesterday we sold the most walks in one day ever, beating the best day last August. On the minus side we received our first payment by PayPal eCheque this morning (no, us neither) and our software sent the customer the walk as normal.

It was only when we got up and read the email from PayPal which said:

Subject: eCheque payment in progress

It usually takes about 5-7 days for you to receive the money (estimated: 22/04/2016 - 26/04/2016). We recommend that you wait until the money arrives before posting items. We'll email you when this eCheque payment has been deposited into your PayPal account.

Then we realised our mistake but that horse has long since bolted.

Still I have now firmly shut the stable door so that won't be happening again but I thought I'd flag it up here.

If you're using PayPal IPN like us then you need to check payment_type and hold shipping if you see any other value than instant (you'll see echeck for an eCheque but there may be others, I've not investigated any further).

Be warned also that some IPN transactions don't include a payment_type field e.g. some subscription related ones.

Update 25/04/16

So, nine(!) days the echeque cleared.

Looking at the IPN array payment_type has a value of echeck again but it looks like the key parameter is payment_status which has a value of Completed to indicate that it's cleared.