title: PayPal PDT Return Link Missing Transaction ID
body: <p>I have PayPal PDT (Payment Data Transfer) enabled on my PayPal account, and I have auto-return turned on, pointing to a "Complete_Paypal_Order" page on my site.</p>
  
  <p>When a customer makes a purchase, and they pay using PayPal's site, they are sent to a page which will redirect them back to my site within 10 seconds. If the customer waits for the redirect, the GET request to my site contains the transaction id, just as it is supposed to.</p>
  
  <p>If, however, the customer clicks the link on PayPal's redirect page that says "If you are not redirected within 10 seconds, click here," the transaction id is <strong>not</strong> passed to my site. Instead, the get request looks like: "<a href="http://.../Complete_Paypal_Order?merchant_return_link=click+here&amp;form_charset=UTF-8" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http://.../Complete_Paypal_Order?merchant_return_link=click+here&amp;form_charset=UTF-8</a>", no matter what the customer ordered. This happens in both sandbox and live PayPal sites.</p>
  
  <p>Has anyone run across this before, and if so, do you know of a solution?</p>
  
  <p>Also, just to be clear, I am aware of some of the drawbacks of PDT, but suffice to say that, for various reasons, changing to IPN or API calls is not an option for the site at this time. So, please don't suggest "just use IPN" or "just use ExpressCheckout API calls."</p>
  
  <p>Related questions (as yet unanswered):</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li><a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10060062/paypal-pdt-unable-to-get-transaction-id">Paypal PDT - unable to get transaction ID</a>.</li>
  <li><a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9908267/paypal-pdt-autoreturn">Paypal PDT AutoReturn</a></li>
  </ul>