Just found out about this going away last night when looking for a way to cancel/refund a pending payment for a customer (doesn't appear to be a way but that is irrelevant to this post). Anyway while clicking around on the subscription I clicked a link that went to the OLD subscription info page https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_merchant-hub and on that page I saw the message about Auto Billing going away at the end of the month. I just got off a 78 minute call with PayPal support, and then a manager where they weren't fully aware of the situation either. The manager I spoke with found out that emails were supposed to have gone out to all customers about this on Nov 7th 2022 but he confirmed looking through my account that I never was sent the email. Was it because I wasn't effected? No one knows. I just got lucky that I clicked on a link and ended up on their old dashboard where it showed at the top, otherwise I'd never have known until Feb 1st came around. (Side note: We have customers all over the world. A similar situation happened in Sept/Oct 2021 where all India payments started failing and PayPal support then too had no idea about why this was happening until starting to dig) Anyway I'm still at this point not even sure I am effected. PayPal seemed to go back and forth on this. We have been creating subscriptions since around 2016 for one of four plans (+ annual option). They all show up in the NEW subscriptions dashboard https://www.paypal.com/billing/subscriptions which is what I typically use, just with the exception that they are planless. As in I'm pretty sure when we created our integration plans didn't exist so we just manually label it a plan name (same name for everyone) when the subscription is created. What our current plan is, ASAP create plans and start having new customers sign up via the new system. PayPal confirmed that this is the correct thing to do. What I don't know about though is what happens to the thousands of existing subscriptions. Will they still work? The manager didn't know and opened a support ticket with a 3 day response time to find out. At the end of the day I am pretty outraged at the lack of communication, lack of migration support, and 3 week timeline to build a new solution and notify thousands of customers to get them to switch to a new payment method. PayPal doesn't even know for sure if they need to. PayPal should either provide an easy way to map or assign existing subscriptions over to a plan, or provide ample time to allow us to communicate to customers that they need to switch and give them time to do so too. I have requested a six month extension on the timeline and I highly suggest everyone else does as well. I have a strong feeling that the majority of people who will be effected by this don't even know about this yet if they haven't stumbled to the old dashboard like we did and seen this. I know this effects a big chunk of reoccurring revenue for us. I imagine it does for many many others as well. I think a six month extension is a tiny ask in order to get things migrated over fully since in effect I only had 3 weeks notice and others might have 0 notice until it stops working.
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