Existing customer can’t buy a new subscription

Hello @dabesa

This seems to be an account related issue, I’m not sure if we can do much regarding this situation. Could you reach out to PayPal Merchant Technical Support and ask them to investigate this issue? I would expect something on your account is blocking a new billing agreement to be created. From the plugin, there is not much we can do to change that situation.

I’ll leave this request open for now, in case MTS tells you the issue is caused on our side, so we can take another look if needed. We will close it if we don’t hear back from you in 1 week.

Kind regards,
Joost

Hello @joostvandevijver ,

Here is the reply from MTS:

We understand that you’ve reach out with error message received for?subscription?API. Based on the information you provided, we found that the billing agreement for the?subscription?is already cancelled. You also mentioned that buyer has already cancelled months ago. We encourage you to create a new?subscription?profile and process the buyer with the new profile.

I guess is the plugin that has to create a new subscription profile?

I added your email in CC to the case, I hope you can help following-up with them to clarify this point.

Thanks!

Hello @dabesa

The subscription API, that MTS referred to, is currently not included in our plugin. We are working on doing this, but at this moment is not present.

It looks like the issue is related to the accounts where the billing agreements are located. It seems the customer is not trying to buy a new subscription, but it looks more like a cancelled subscription (with cancelled billing agreement) is trying to be re-activated. This will not work, since the billing agreement is not in place any longer and needs to be re-generated. This should be done by having the customer buy a new subscription product, so that the billing agreement will also be recreated.

We don’t believe this is related to our plugin, so we will not get involved in the discussion with MTS. The best way forward is to find out why the billing agreement was cancelled and guide the customer to taking the correct steps to get this billing agreement to be recreated.

Kind regards,
Joost

Hello @joostvandevijver ,

The customer is buy a new subscription from our website, not re-activating an old billing agreement.

his should be done by having the customer buy a new subscription product, so that the billing agreement will also be recreated.

That’s what they are doing. They try to complete the order from our website that runs WooCommerce Subscriptions and your plugin.

The order fails with the error reported above.

It looks like the issue here is that a new billing agreement is not created, and instead it tries to use the old one that is cancelled.

Thanks

Hello @dabesa

These billing agreements are stored on the PayPal account and are not present on the WooCommerce site or the PayPal plugin, so this issue is being caused on the PayPal server.

You might want to ask PayPal Merchant Technical Support to review and possibly clear any billing agreement between the merchant and customer accounts. That way, creating a new billing agreement by purchasing a new subscription should be no issue.

Kind regards,
Joost

Hi Joost,

MTS keeps repeating this:

Therefore, would you please try to process these subscription and as new orders without using any referenced to the old billing agreement? If you receive any error message, please kindly provide the debug IDs so we can assist you further.

I have no control on referenced billing agreements…
What can I tell them?
Can you step in the conversation?

Thank you

Hello @dabesa

Sorry that this is not moving forward as much as you would hope, but this is a very uncommon situation, that we have no straight answer for.

There are some things we can still advise (but we still believe this issue is not caused by the plugin):
– First advice would be to continue with MTS and provide them the Debug IDs to further investigate.
– You can delete the billing agreement with this customer (on the PayPal site), this could possibly make a change, but be aware that this could also affect existing subscriptions that they would need to re-create afterward.
– If you can provide us with the Debug ID / Transaction ID, we could ask with our PayPal contacts if they can take a look. In this case, it would also be good to have the reference of the MTS engagement.

If you don’t feel comfortable sharing those details on a public forum, please open a ticket with our service desk. You can find the instruction for this here: https://paypal.inpsyde.com/docs/request-support/
(please add the URL of this thread in the ticket as well)

Kind regards,
Joost

Hello,

It has been quite some time since our last communication, so we will mark this thread as resolved. Please open a new thread if you are still facing issues or have questions that you need us to answer.

Kind regards,
Joost