Subscriptions + migrating from the WooCommerce Stripe plugin

Hi @tristanmason,

Yes it is possible to migrate to our plugin seamlessly. The plugin knows how to read the values from the WooCommerce Stripe Gateway plugin.

I always recommend you perform a test on your staging site to confirm all the values are read/converted properly before you make the switch in production.

Kind Regards,

@mrclayton Thank you! Yes, we will test it in staging first as you recommended.

Do we need to do anything in particular to migrate our WooCommerce Subscriptions? In your docs I found this page about migrating from Braintree: https://docs.paymentplugins.com/wc-stripe/config/#/data_migration?id=steps , but the image is broken.

Hi @tristanmason,

Sorry about that, we need to update our documentation as there appears to be some overlap between our Stripe and Braintree docs. The Braintree migration steps are not relevant in this case.

Do we need to do anything in particular to migrate our WooCommerce Subscriptions?

For Stripe all you have to do is disable the other plugin then enable ours and everything else is automated.

Please let us know once you have tested and everything works as expected.

Kind Regards,

@mrclayton Many thanks! Will do.

Hello,

For Stripe all you have to do is disable the other plugin then enable ours and everything else is automated.

When I tried this in our staging site, it did not migrate our API keys, and when I went into your plugin’s settings, it presented me with a Connect button to connect to Stripe. Wasn’t it supposed to transfer the settings automatically?

Thanks,
Tristan

Hi @tristanmason,

Wasn’t it supposed to transfer the settings automatically?

Settings are not migrated, your customer’s data is which includes, customer ID’s, payment methods, orders, and subscriptions.

You must connect our plugin once installed because this plugin’s settings are different than the other plugin. You will want to enable the different payment options as well such as Apple Pay, GPay, etc.

That shouldn’t be more than a minute or two of work.

Kind Regards,

@mrclayton Thanks! The connection process was indeed easy. For anyone finding this thread in the future: I needed to be logged in as the account owner to connect. Having developer permissions for a Stripe account was not enough in my case.

Question – the plugin migrated almost all of the subscriptions; however, we are running into a problem where a few recurring payments are failing with this error:

Recurring payment for order failed. Reason: You passed an empty string for ‘payment_method’. We assume empty values are an attempt to unset a parameter; however ‘payment_method’ cannot be unset. You should remove ‘payment_method’ from your request or supply a non-empty value.

When we look at them, these subscription orders are all missing a Payment Method Token (the field was blank). My client says with the previous plugin (WooCommerce Stripe), this field could be blank and it would still pull a payment.

The client says they had to process these payments manually:

I logged into stripe, processed the amount, then copied the transaction ID to the pending payment in Woo, this when marked complete, updated the subscription to active again.?

Clearly that isn’t a good long-term solution – do you have any idea why this is happening and what we can do to fix it? Thanks!

Hi @tristanmason,

When we look at them, these subscription orders are all missing a Payment Method Token (the field was blank)

Which payment gateway are these subscriptions for? If the _payment_method_token meta key is empty then you can just populate that value on the Edit Subscription page by clicking the billing fields edit icon. A field for the payment method token will appear and you can add it there then click the update button.

My client says with the previous plugin (WooCommerce Stripe), this field could be blank and it would still pull a payment

It should never be blank, but it sounds like the other plugin was just charging the customer’s default payment method if it was blank. I’d prefer that your client’s data is consistent and thus my recommendation that they add the payment method token to the subscription. This will ensure the renewal payments process without issue.

Kind Regards,

@mrclayton Thanks for quick reply! To answer your question, on all orders I’ve seen so far (both on the orders that failed and the client manually re-ran, and on the orders that renewed correctly), the payment gateway is now “Credit Cards”. When I hover over the question mark icon, they say “Gateway ID: [stripe_cc]”.

This may be extraneous info, but on those orders that failed and the client manually re-ran, the following note appears on the subscription afterward:

Payment method changed from “Credit Card (Stripe)” to “Credit Cards” by the subscriber.

I asked to client to follow your instructions and populate the payment method token field on the subscription next time one of these fails. Will report back. Thanks again!