Is Paypal retiring Auto Bill and how does that effect my customers on auto bill?

[Murray_Rushmore]

Today I saw this message in my Recurring Payments Dashboard

"PayPal will be retiring Auto Billing from our suite of recurring payments products on January 31st, 2023. Merchants will not be able to use Auto Billing to receive payments after January 31st, 2023. If you use the Auto Billing product, please sign up for PayPal’s Subscription management product to continue receiving payments after 31st January 2023."

"Please be aware any customers currently signed up for recurring payments using the Auto Billing product will need to create new Subscription billing plans to prevent disruption in service and that you may need to reach out to your customers to manage any outstanding payments that were enabled by Auto Billing."

Does this actually mean I am going to need to contact all of my individual customers and have them sign up for an entirely new auto pay subscription by January 31st?

[ScannerDanner]

100% same thing I got. First call to them the support person said my recurring subscriptions are ending. Second call 8 hours later after a panic filled day, I find out that this was 100% false. Only the "Auto Billing product" is being ended and my regular subscription based recurring payments will NOT be affected. The support person confirmed this with their internal team too. From what I gather the Auto billing can vary in the amount a customer is charged each month and the customer agrees to a maximum number. This is not what I'm doing. I have a set price to access a portion of my website that is behind a pay wall and it is the same every month. Again. I'm told this service will NOT be affected. As others have said, it seems their own people don't even fully know what's really being cancelled. I wish I felt 100% on this. Need Feb 1st to get here asap.

[algo_coder45]

I contacted PayPal MTS again via my existing ticket and they reassured me my existing recurring profiles created via the APIs below will still function properly after the end of this month (since they appear in the Subscriptions section of my PayPal account).

https://developer.paypal.com/docs/api/payments.billing-plans/v1/

https://developer.paypal.com/docs/api/payments.billing-agreements/v1/

That is by far the biggest risk/concern I had since the majority of our revenues come from our existing profiles. Keep in mind, they told me that the above APIs will be retired though at EOM. For us, that means we must start using Subscriptions APIs when creating new recurring payments moving forward:

https://developer.paypal.com/docs/api/subscriptions/v1/

I hope that helps anyone else having a panic attack 🙂

[Murray_Rushmore]

This should be interesting for our businesses, as I'm basically a one-man band, having set up our membership site with three levels of "subscriptions" with the use of a plugin called "Paid Membership Pro", which basically walked me through the set up years ago. 

I don't know if I need to change anything at all, or how, lol, gah.

[algo_coder45]

When you go to this page in your PayPal account, do you see your 3 plans?

https://www.paypal.com/billing/plans

If so, do you see any "Active Subscriptions"  listed next to each plan? If so, you might be fine from what I've gathered so far. If you don't see any plans, that could be a red flag...

[Murray_Rushmore]

Well, all our "Plans" were created with the "Paid Membership Pro" plug-in. They manage the subscriptions, not PayPal But, when billed within PayPal, they are called "Subscriptions", and when our members sign up, they are taken to PayPal through a PayPal "Subscribe" button (they choose one of our three "plans", and subscribe to that plan). Because we didn't create any "Plans" within PayPal itself 🤔 this page is blank within PayPal for us. There are lots of plug ins that manage subscriptions, and the plug in team hasn't indicated they expect any problems with PayPal 🤔

[SocialBlade]

Even though I was assured via the MTS ticket, paypal support over the phone, and others in this thread who also did the same homework I was dreading Feb 1st rolling around just in case.  That said, good news! It is Feb 1st and subscription payments are still working and new ones can still be created using the same system we've been using for years!

Hopefully I'm not celebrating too soon though because the https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_merchant-hub page still shows the same message, and the "Sign up for Enhanced Recurring Payments" link is still there and works (at least the landing page) which is what I thought was supposed to be going away.

Thank you to everyone who joined in here with their experiences going through the same panic, but I think we're all in the clear *knock on wood*!

[ScannerDanner]

100%! Feb 1st couldn't get here fast enough. All is well with our website recurring subscriptions too. PayPal really dropped the ball with how this notification was worded and even their support got it wrong the first time I called. It sure made for a panic stricken 8 hours before I called them back again and was told that what I have will okay. I can breath easy again!

[Murray_Rushmore]

Yep, exactly the same reaction. Eventhough i had been assured by their very nice support team, I was nervous about February 1st. But, all good today, all subscriptions went through. Again, the more and more I thought about it, it seemed highly unlikely they'd kill off a huge revenue stream of automatic payments, so all good 👍 And yeah, wish they would have worded it better initially 😎👍 All the best in the future.