IPN Notifications

IPN (Instant Payment Notification) is a notification sent from one server to another through an HTTP POST request informing your transactions.

To receive event notifications on your platform, you can previously configure a notification_url accessible for Mercado Pago.

Events

We notify events related to your orders (merchant_orders), received chargebacks (chargebacks) or received payments (payment).

A merchant_order is an entity that groups payments as well as shipments. You will have to check the data of the orders notified to you.

Whenever an event related to any of the mentioned resources takes place, we will send you a notification using HTTP POST to the URL that you specified.

If your application is not available or takes too long to respond, Mercado Pago will retry sending the notification according to the following interval:

1. Retry after 5 minutes.
2. Retry after 45 minutes.
3. Retry after 6 hours.
4. Retry after 2 days.
5. Retry after 4 days.

Mercado Pago will notify to this URL whenever a resource is created or when orders or payment status are updated, with two parameters:

Example: If you have configured the URL: https://www.yoursite.com/notifications, you will receive payment notifications as follows: https://www.yoursite.com/notifications?topic=payment&id=123456789

What should I do after receiving a notification?

When you receive a notification in your platform, Mercado Pago awaits a response to validate that you received it correctly. To do this, you have to send a response with a HTTP STATUS 200 (OK) or 201 (CREATED).

Note that this communication is made exclusively between MercadoPago’s servers and your server, so there will be no physical user viewing any kind of result.

After that, you will be able to get full information about the notified resource by accessing the corresponding API at https://api.mercadopago.com/:

With this information you can make the necessary updates on your platform, such as registering an approved payment or a closed order.

Merchant_orders notifications

If you are integrating in-person payments, we recommend to use topic merchant_order IPN notifications. To do this, bear in mind the rules below:

1. The merchant_order status field will remain open if there are no associated payments or, otherwise, if they are rejected or approved for an amount lower than total order amount.
2. The merchant_order status field will be closed when the sum of approved payments is equal to or higher than total order amount.

You will find all the payments in the order, under the payments object. To make refunds, it is important to get the id of payments with status = approved.

Implement the notification receiver using the following code as example:

<?php
    MercadoPago\SDK::setAccessToken("ENV_ACCESS_TOKEN");

    $merchant_order = null;

    switch($_GET["topic"]) {
        case "payment":
            $payment = MercadoPago\Payment::find_by_id($_GET["id"]);
            // Get the payment and the corresponding merchant_order reported by the IPN.
            $merchant_order = MercadoPago\MerchantOrder::find_by_id($payment->order->id);
            break;
        case "merchant_order":
            $merchant_order = MercadoPago\MerchantOrder::find_by_id($_GET["id"]);
            break;
    }

    $paid_amount = 0;
    foreach ($merchant_order->payments as $payment) {   
        if ($payment['status'] == 'approved'){
            $paid_amount += $payment['transaction_amount'];
        }
    }

    // If the payment's transaction amount is equal (or bigger) than the merchant_order's amount you can release your items
    if($paid_amount >= $merchant_order->total_amount){
        if (count($merchant_order->shipments)>0) { // The merchant_order has shipments
            if($merchant_order->shipments[0]->status == "ready_to_ship") {
                print_r("Totally paid. Print the label and release your item.");
            }
        } else { // The merchant_order don't has any shipments
            print_r("Totally paid. Release your item.");
        }
    } else {
        print_r("Not paid yet. Do not release your item.");
    }

?>

To get your ACCESS_TOKEN, check the Credentials section.

Order Search

If you are integrating in-person payments, order search using its external_reference as search criterion should be implemented as a contingency measure.

curl -X GET \
    -H 'Authorization: Bearer $ACCESS_TOKEN' \
    https://api.mercadopago.com/merchant_orders?external_reference=$EXTERNAL_REFERENCE

Find more information in API Reference.

There are two ways to implement search by external_reference:

Each QR scanning generates a different merchant_order. Consider that, if a customer scans more than once, an order will remain open indefinitely. To close the transaction, you should take the merchant_order with status = closed.

If the search is made after QR scanning, all order-related data will be shown:

{
  "id": 1126664483,
  "status": "closed",
  "payments": [
     {
      "id": 4996721469,
      "transaction_amount": 4,
      "status": "rejected",
      [...],
    },
     {
      "id": 4996721476,
      "transaction_amount": 4,
      "status": "approved",
      [...], }, 

Otherwise, if the order posted QR has not been scanned yet, the answer will be:

{
   "elements": null,
   "next_offset": 0,
   "total": 0
 }

Receive only one type of notification

If you want to receive notifications only from IPN, and not from Webhooks, you can add in the notification_url the parameter source_news=ipn. For example:

https://www.yourserver.com/notifications?source_news=ipn

The change doesn't affect the parameters already included in the URL.