Upcoming Change to PayPal Subscriptions

[MTS_Ciaran]

PayPal is making changes to the way Subscriptions are created, managed, and displayed. For additional information, see our article Why am I seeing changes to how Subscriptions are reflected?

[getclicky]

@freedomsks

You're right, I missed "recurring_payment_profile_created" somehow. Thanks, I will add that in to my code. Sadly I can't edit my old post, I guess you can only do that for a small amount of time.

We don't worry about the "skipped" stuff, our subs are configured to cancel automatically if a payment fails (and the 2x retries). This is the default behavior I believe.

[S_S_S]

Hi @Rob-sortitoutsi,

The subscr_eot will still be sent when you (or the customer) goes in and cancels the plan. We've made a habit of going in to manually cancel the plan each time we receive a "recurring_payment_suspended_due_to_max_failed_payment". Annoying, but otherwise you will be left will all those suspended plans that may get activated at a later time and if you allow that you would need to handle a bunch of other messages too.

Jm

[not_here]

Hi @btibor

Re: Q1 - I'm working on getting a timeframe on how long to expect between requesting the mapping and delivery, I'll respond as soon as I know.

Re: Q2 - I'll work towards getting you an answer to this question. 

Thanks,
Christina

[stoem]

We are receiving some messages like this:

"Automatic payments from [user] have failed 1 times. As a result, we won't attempt to process these payments again. Please contact your customer direct to collect the outstanding balance."

What is this supposed to be? Try a payment once, then suspend the subscription? Why on earth would you not retry it, and why would you change this from how it used to work? 
Please can this be reversed and payments retried several times before being cancelled? By the way, this subscription started life as a S- subscription, it's morphed into an I- subscription now.

Stefan

[u_brain]

Old way:

Customer's card expires, their sub fails (first try)... We notify them, so they update to their new card on their PayPal account but don't realise they need to update the funding source on the sub separately so it fails again (2nd try). We notify, they update, payment goes through (3rd try.) 

Typically, at each point they apologise and ask if they need to subscribe afresh. We assure that they don't.

Although an inconvenient and inefficient process, the sub is nevertheless maintained.

New way:

Customer's card expires, their sub fails.

They apologise and ask if they need to subscribe afresh. We say 'yes - shall we simplify things by doing it with a standing order?'

Conclusion:

PayPal is, as it began, a convenient mechanism in the procurement of new business. It has never IMHO been great for maintaining ongoing financial relationships with clients and PayPal seems keen, through this change in procedure, to diminish that functionality further.

[S_S_S]

Hi @not_here,

We are also seeing the issue that @u_brain mentioned: In the conversion from 'S' type to 'I' type the number of allowed payment failures is set to "suspend after 1 payment failure", while it used to be "suspend after the 3rd failure" previously. I see that we can look up a new 'I-type' subscription and change the plan back to 3 and save it. That's half a dozen clicks for each subscription, and we have 3000+.

• Does changing this setting prompt an email notification to the customer?
• Is there a way to do this programmatically through the API?
• Any chance you can fix this on your end? (We were promised 'no changes' would take place in the conversion...)

[not_here]

Hi @S_S_S

I'm checking with the team. In the meantime, can you submit a ticket to our technical support team. In the ticket, you can link to this conversation so that the agent has context and can reach out to me. Thanks!

Christina 

[S_S_S]

@not_here Ok, thanks, filed it as case  04617262

[S_S_S]

Tech support came back with the advise to run a batch update script to change the maximum number of allowed failures.

METHOD = UpdateRecurringPaymentsProfile
VERSION = 204.0
PROFILEID = I-XXXXXXXXXXXX
MAXFAILEDPAYMENTS = 3

Ref.: https://developer.paypal.com/docs/classic/api/merchant/UpdateRecurringPaymentsProfile_API_Operation_...

You would need to make this call for each I- sub in your account. 

[swinny]

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@S_S_S wrote:

Tech support came back with the advise to run a batch update script to change the maximum number of allowed failures.

---

that's insane.

Anyways, i would have hoped that max failures value could have been specified during subscription set up by passing a value (1 , 2 or 3) with the rest of the data.  Since we can edit it on the paypal website, why shouldnt it be configurable at set up in an automated manner?  Do they honestly think we want to go into our paypal account every time a subscription is set up by a user and change the value manually?