How to disable PayPal for subscriptions

Hi @heartharmony,

The subscription functionality in PayPal Payments is only active when the Vaulting feature is enabled. The PayPal gateway/buttons will not be displayed for subscription products when Vaulting is disabled and when manual renewals are not accepted in the Subscriptions plugin settings.

For now, there is no option to enable Vaulting but disallow subscription purchases.

Kind regards,
Niklas

Thanks Niklas.

We do want manual subscriptions to be offered – but not through PayPal.

We want Vaulting disabled – manual renewals permitted through our subscriptions plugin and no PayPal button to be displayed.

The old PayPal Standard plugin had that functionality. Has that been removed?

Hi @heartharmony,

It’s not like this behavior has been deliberately removed, but PayPal Payments works fundamentally different in many ways compared to the old Standard integration.
I created an issue for us to look into the possibility of preventing the use with subscriptions entirely. But usually, all payment gateways will show up when manual renewals are enabled in the Subscriptions plugin and PayPal Standard is special in that regard.

In any case, we will implement a feature to make it easier for everyone to conditionally disable the smart buttons and/or the gateway(s). This could then also be used for your particular application.
In the meantime, the checkout gateway could only be disabled with custom code or a plugin like this. But that wouldn’t actually hide the smart buttons on the non-checkout pages in case they are enabled.
So for now, there is no easy & elegant solution to this problem, but it should eventually be covered when we add additional functionality to interface with the plugin in a more classic way.

In theory, it could be done now already but extending the plugin requires custom code that may be difficult to come up with and which we don’t provide for the moment.

Kind regards,
Niklas

Thanks Niklas. We have gone for the plugin solution for now and will keep an eye on your developments.

The client is a very small not for profit with turnover of less than $10,000US per month so they are not eligible for PayPal Reference Transactions to be enabled on their account.

That’s why we needed to disable PayPal for subscription purchases, but still have it available for other purchases such as events.

Thanks for your help

Ingrid

Hi @heartharmony,

We are in the early planning phases but we aim to eventually implement a new PayPal Subscriptions API as a fallback solution for when Reference Transactions are not available. This comes with a few restrictions compared to advanced features via Vaulting but should help enable subscriptions for more merchants.
We will also olook into providing a native way to disable subscription support (even for manual renewals) but I can’t say too much about will happen in this regard.
I would mark this thread resolved for now, but when there are any developments, we’ll try to let you know as we linked the thread in our developer issue.

For any further questions, feel free to reach out anytime. Thanks!

Kind regards,
Niklas

Yet another example of problems created by this Paypal plugin “upgrade.” Just checking to see if there is a solution yet? We don’t want Paypal enabled for subscriptions because it causes technical issues for the customers.

Hi @microtribe,

If you need assistance, especially with subscriptions, I suggest creating a new thread to get to the core of the problem you experience.
Considering PayPal Payments works fundamentally different than PayPal Standard, there is no technical need for it to be disabled for subscription products when manual renewals are enabled. Beyond the old Standard integration, I’m not aware of any other payment gateway that would do this. But interest in such a feature can be expressed here: https://github.com/woocommerce/woocommerce-paypal-payments/issues/593

@heartharmony There isn’t yet a feature to entirely disable PayPal Payments for subscriptions products (see link above), but there have been some improvements that allow me to create an example filter to remove the buttons and gateway(s) for subscription products in the cart/checkout:
https://gist.github.com/InpsydeNiklas/ed7c3d9579902859c51023579caad0c6

In any case, the overall subscription integration will be improved over the next few updates. Without Reference Transactions, automatic renewals wouldn’t work but payment methods can still be saved in the Vault and manual renewals with the saved payment method are possible.

Kind regards,
Niklas

Thanks Niklas. My client decided it was simpler just to remove PayPal as a payment option across the website and now simply use Stripe to process all payments. I am sure other businesses will be doing something similar.