Hooks between PayPal and WooCommerce Subscription simply doesn't work

[obey24com]

I'm in touch with the support since 1 year now. We have so many issues with this and no one (Neither Woo-Support, nor Woo PayPal Payments Support / Syde) could resolve the problems. It seems like the PayPal hook simply doesn't work.

We have a few users subscribed to a product. Issues we're facing:

• Next Payment Date, Last Order Date and "Orders" are not always correct (for just some users they are but there is no indicator why)
• When the users cancels the subscription on the frontend, it will not trigger PayPal to cancel the sub.
• Some Subs will renew on PayPal, but not on WooCommerce Sub.

Did anyone face the same issues and got any solutions or alternative Plugins? I don't want to write back and forth with the support anymore.

[mattallan]

Hey @obey24com, sorry to hear you've also been having these ongoing issues with Subscriptions and PayPal payments!

Just to confirm:

• do you have Subscriptions Mode set to "PayPal Subscriptions" in your PayPal Payments settings?
• is your site properly setup to receive/send requests from PayPal related to your subscriptions?

Assuming the above point, back in September, 2024 I found multiple bugs with the PayPal Subscriptions feature and have passed them along to the Syde team. Here's the list of issues I found:

1. When a subscription renews, the customer is charged by PayPal, but no renewal order was created in WooCommerce.

Note

This looks to have been fixed in PayPal Payments version 2.9.4 which was released on November 11th.

2. Cancelling a subscription from the WooCommerce > Subscriptions list table, does not cancel the subscription on PayPal.
3. Subscriptions never update their next payment date in WooCommerce - resulting in subscriptions appearing to be overdue when they're not.

Note

I followed-up internally with Syde regarding this issue again on Dec 30, 2024.

4. Placing a subscription on-hold in WooCommerce doesn’t pause the subscription in PayPal.

Based on your comments, it looks like some of these haven't been fixed so I'll pass this along to the Syde team again.

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any solutions or alternative Plugins?

I would personally not recommend setting Subscriptions Mode to "PayPal Subscriptions" and would recommend getting vaulting enabled on your PayPal account and then setting Subscriptions Mode to "PayPal Vaulting" instead.

I'm not familiar with the process of enabling vaulting/references transactions, but there's a doc here: https://woocommerce.com/document/woocommerce-paypal-payments/#get-vaulting-approval

What is the difference between PayPal Subscriptions and PayPal Vaulting?

For stores with Subscriptions Mode set to PayPal Subscriptions, when a customer purchases a subscription product, this creates a subscription in both Woo and PayPal. PayPal manages the billing side of this subscription and Woo attempts to keep its version of the subscription in sync with PayPal. When PayPal processes a renewal, your Woo store needs to successfully handle the webhook.

For stores with Subscriptions Mode set to PayPal Vaulting, there is no subscription that gets created on PayPal's side. Your WooCommerce store manages the subscriptions billing cycle and charges the renewal orders using a saved payment token provided by PayPal.

There are challenges and risks associated with Subscriptions Mode set to PayPal Subscriptions so unless you need to have subscriptions created on PayPal's side, I would suggest looking into PayPal Vaulting and relying on WooCommerce Subscriptions to handling the renewal process.

Hope this all makes sense, feel free to respond with any follow-up questions!