In my last blog I talked about the online stores that I recently set up. Many Shopping Carts use PayPal's IPN feature which sends customers back to the proper page on your site to receive instructions. I had a Hosting Business set up already so that meant that I needed to use IPN three separate times. PayPal accounts are set up to allow for using IPN only once. This is a serious limitation and a serious issue for people who want to own several online stores and use PayPal for the payment gateway with them on the one account. I couldn't find any good solutions by reading the documentation so I contacted PayPal support. A man responded to me, quickly, with a suggestion that I include some code in my buttons. It didn't look that easy and I didn't want to delve into it. Another unappealing solution is to have two different PayPal Business accounts.

I began searching and I found a simple PHP script which would allow me to work around the limitation. Scriptomart.com offers a great little script called Paypal IPN Multiple Email Accounts. By setting up this script on any domain that you own, you can give a redirect to PayPal's IPN so that it deals with any email address you want to use with each particular store that you have. It will work with stores that are on different domains (other than the originating). You configure it to your primary PayPal email address, or in some instances, a different email may be used if your Store script allows.. The Scriptomart company claims to have had 6 different sites running from one script. I have 3 stores linked to one instance. Paypal IPN Multiple Email Accounts is simple, powerful and effective. I verified that it works properly through my sites. The price is right at $14.99. However, due to the registration process, it will be locked to the domain where it is installed. This is no big deal to me to obtain such a useful script for such a low price.