The PayPal Secure FTP Server is a PayPal service for business partners and large merchants to programmatically retrieve the results of PayPal processing in the form of output data, such as reports from PayPal. The Secure FTP Server is access-controlled.
The following topics are discussed here:
You must contact your PayPal Account Manager to sign up for access to the Secure FTP Server. PayPal will then send an email message to your primary email address indicating that you have been granted access to the Secure FTP Server.
After your Account Manager grants you access to the Secure FTP Server, perform the following steps to set up a Secure FTP Server user account:
Log in to your PayPal account at https://www.paypal.com.
Click the Profile tab.
Under Reports Settings, click Secure FTP Users.
On the Secure FTP Users page, click Add to add a user.
Verify your identity by re-entering the full account number associated of the bank account associated with your PayPal account.
On the Create Secure FTP Server User page, enter the first name, last name, confirm and reconfirm a password, agree to the terms of use, and click Create User.
The Secure FTP Server username and password are unique and distinct from the usernames and passwords for logging into any other PayPal service, including www.paypal.com.
From the displayed page, make a note of the PayPal-generated Secure FTP user account name. The Secure FTP Server username is pre-populated by the PayPal system.
Reports are retained on the Secure FTP Server for 1 year after their creation.
The PayPal Secure FTP Server is a secure File Transfer Protocol (sFTP) server. Programmatic access to the Secure FTP Server is by way of any sFTP client of your choice, such as winscp.
The hostname of the Secure FTP Server is reports.paypal.com.
Business partners and large merchants select a Secure FTP Server username and password while creating a Secure FTP Server user account. For more information, refer to Creating Secure FTP Server User on www.paypal.com.
The Secure FTP Server has the following directory structure:
ppreports/outgoing - to hold report files.
The file naming conventions for individual reports on the Secure FTP Server are detailed in the PayPal specification for those individual reports.
The following UNIX shell script is an example for the programmatic retrieval of all reports from the Secure FTP Server. Lines on the left are for ease of reference, and comments explain the commands.
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Script |
Comment |
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1. #!/bin/sh |
A UNIX Bourne shell script |
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2. sftp reports.paypal.com < 'EOF' |
Start file transfer to or from host reports.paypal.com. This script is a "here" and "now" document: all lines between the first EOF and last EOF will be processed by the sftp command. |
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3. cd ppreports/outgoing |
Change to the ppreports/outgoing directory. |
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4. get STL-20060902.01.001.csv |
Get a settlement report (version 1.0) dated 09/02/2007. |
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5. bye |
Log off |
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6. EOF |
End of script |