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My PayPal IPN scripts runs very well. When I test with my sandbox account it, the payment is made instantly, however when I use my client's business email, I got payment_status as 'Pending', with pending_reason as 'unilateral' in the IPN log call.

My client's email is confirmed at PayPal. So can anyone tell me why I am getting this issue?

Alex Dean
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Sarbjit Singh
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4 Answers4

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pending_reason=unilateral means that the email address of the payment recipient has not been registered with PayPal. For the full list of pending reasons, see the PayPal IPN documentation.

Check the email address for typos, and double-check with your client that they truly have registered their address with PayPal (they may not understand what this entails).

Alex Dean
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  • Yes Alex I have confirmed this thing from my client. They are registered with paypal and even they are recieving payments from their customers. – Sarbjit Singh Apr 16 '12 at 10:23
  • I'm really puzzled then Sarbjit. I recommend getting them to login to their PayPal account and confirming if they can see the payments. Also add a debug log line in your app to doublecheck that the email address you are sending is the same as their registered email. – Alex Dean Apr 16 '12 at 10:45
  • I have already created a log file and email is same. Alex it may be the reason, if client has not confirmed his address (not email address) with paypal? – Sarbjit Singh Apr 16 '12 at 10:57
  • I don't think the real address matters. Get them to login and tell you if they can see the payments - and get them to send you a screenshot of their account details with email address. I suspect they've given you the wrong email. There aren't any weird characters in the email address are there? – Alex Dean Apr 16 '12 at 11:03
  • ok I'll recheck with them again. Alex they are able to see the payments, because after the confirmation of payments they are placing the orders. – Sarbjit Singh Apr 16 '12 at 11:36
  • Alex my client shown me the payments that they recieved. I don't know whats going on, we call paypal for help let us see what will they respond. hope to get good news soon – Sarbjit Singh Apr 17 '12 at 05:29
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    I found that some times this happened while testing with sandbox account. Now I have tested it with live account, which is working fine now. Thanks!! – Sarbjit Singh Apr 22 '12 at 07:39
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Only accounts made in www.sandbox.paypal.com exists when testing on www.sandbox.paypal.com. So you can't use live accounts for testing, because they don't exist within the sandbox site. You should create the accounts at developer.paypal.com

Jorjon
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I had this problem - I was sending PayPal my "live" payer_email, when I changed it to the business email in the sandbox it worked. same as my live email with ****-facilitator@yoursite.com

Chris Webb
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    I had the same problem here - for clarity's sake, in my case it was in the Paypal webhook I was sending the incorrect email, and switching this to ****-facilitator@yoursite.com got things working. – SRack Nov 03 '15 at 11:57
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Double-check if your Paypal primary email address has been confirmed. For me this error happened when my client's email wasn't confirmed yet, of all things!

JD Smith
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