Auto update "Order Status" in Virtuemart 2.0.8 to "shipped"?

[letsneck]

I am running Virtuemart 2.0.8 and Joomla 1.5.25.

Is there a way to auto update the "Order Status" to "shipped" when an item is shipped, and then have an email sent to the customer?

Once the item has been paid through Paypal, the virtuemart auto updates the "Order Status" to "Confirmed", but once the item has been shipped through Paypal, the virtuemart does not auto update the "Order Status" to "Shipped". Ebay does this automatically.

Is there a Paypal module or extension/ plug in, so that I can ship products directly from the Virtuemart "Order Status" page?

Will you please help me resolve this issue? I am having to go back and forth from Virtuemart order status page to Paypal.

[PRO]

ebay can do this because they own paypal.

This would take a virtuemart plugin on the paypal side for paypal to talk to virtuemart after the original transaction

[PolishedGeek]

The payment status is updated because PayPal offers a web service called Instant Payment Notification (IPN), which is how VirtueMart "knows" that the payment was made and updates the order to confirmed. I did a quick look through the PayPal documentation and didn't find an equivalent shipping notification web service. So there doesn't appear to be a simple way to get that information from PayPal in real time.

There is probably a PayPal API call available that could be integrated with VM to handle triggering the order upgrades. I'd suggest doing some research on PayPal's X-Commerce site to see what's available. As long as there is a way to query PayPal via an API call to see what orders have been changed to status = "Shipped", custom integration could be developed to use that API information to update VM order status automatically.  A developer experienced in external API integrations with VirtueMart and Joomla could custom develop this for you.