Migrate from Skyverge Braintree extension

WooThemes support told be: “The Braintree extension has been retired in favor of the free extension, PayPal Powered by Braintree. You should go ahead and switch as the older plugin will not be updated.”

From the other side, they released an update to 3.3.1 on 16.06.2016. Also new plugin doesn’t work for all countries: https://docs.woothemes.com/document/woocommerce-gateway-paypal-powered-by-braintree/

This isn’t a drop in replacement. We use a new way of fetching credentials (OAuth) instead of having to type them in. You’ll have to spend a minute authorizing your site to use Braintree.

The old credit card tokens are still saved in your database but they’re not currently compatible with this plugin. In short this means that your customers will have to reenter their credit card details once.

They’ll be saved into Braintree and you’ll get a new token which will work with this plugin.

We have this feature on our radar to make it possibly to use (conver or update) the old tokens to use with the new plugin.

Thanks – this is a huge issue. All the auto-renewals on subscriptions will be broken and have to get new auth. Please create a migration guide and consider the use case. I’m sure there is a clever way to do this – even a paid solution.

FYI for those who are also interested, I contacted Skyverge. They were very prompt and professional in their response. they said:
I’m afraid that WooCommerce and PayPal jointly decided to retire our Braintree plugin favor of the free connector they’d built, at which time our plugin was removed from the marketplace. As such, we don’t really have any influence over how this new plugin would handle subscriptions or why it doesn’t include any migration path.

I would recommend that you open a thread with the WooCommerce team about this as well (either via their help desk or www.ads-software.com), we pass along feedback but I think it means a lot more coming from merchants and agencies who deal with these issues first hand.

I can assure you that this is a priority for us, and we’ve been working with Woo and PayPal in the hopes to get our plugin re-listed, as it offers a different feature set. They’ve updated their document to reflect this: https://docs.woocommerce.com/document/woocommerce-gateway-paypal-powered-by-braintree/#do-you-have-a-braintree-extension-that-works-in-non-us-countries

However, we’ve not heard any definitive news from their team yet on whether they plan to re-list or plugin, or whether we should move in a different direction. I know this kind of ambiguity around a central part of your client’s site is not ideal, and if you’d like, I’d be happy to add you to a notification list to keep you in the loop as to the progress of these discussions.

Once we know more about the status of our plugin in the marketplace and if it will indeed return, I can definitely provide more information.

Note – I’ll update here too and there are several other plugins that may help address this issue, if i find something useful will post.

Does anyone have any updates on a migration plugin for moving from Skyverge to the new Braintree extension. We have the same issues with Subscriptions, and I think it’s unacceptable to not provide a migration option for the old tokens since we have no choice but to switch plugins eventually.

I just found out this on FAQ page:

What do I need to do if I’m updating from the retired premium Braintree plugin from WooThemes.com?
You’ll need to go through the same installation process as everyone else. Luckily it’s only a few clicks (no need to copy and paste API keys) so it should only take a minute.

Credit card tokens will not migrate. Your customers will have to reenter their CC details once. All transactions made with the new plugin will let the user choose if they want their CC details saved (as tokens of course) so they don’t have to reneter them every time.

It basically means that WooThemes don’t care about migration…

I would like to know an engineer explanation why token migration is not provided sofar by design.

Whoever decided on this strategy thus far, may not realize the monetary impact it has. When you force people to meddle with credit card infos, you lose a % of your customers, guaranteed, every time.

It may be the technicals can’t be fixed. In that case we’re in for a world of hurt.

Maybe it’s a matter of upstream investment. Here, there’s a chance – community can help, etc.

Which is it?

I have the same dilemma. We expect to lose some subscribers if we force them to reenter credit card info. Seeing as Braintree already has the customer information, they are losing business by not working with Woocommerce to implement a migration.

I’d also like to add that I’m unable to use the new free plugin in my staging environment because Woocommerce will only connect the plugin to the url connected to my Woocommerce account. (I’m using Siteground and the staging environment is set up in a subdomain, which is probably the issue, so I’ll work with them on finding a solution. Still pretty annoying, though, that I can’t sandbox test the plugin on whatever site I want.)

This is another blunder by paypal and woocommerce. The level of marketing effort to get a client to auto-renew is significant. After all that work and cost we 1) have to start from scratch and 2) have to inconvenience them after telling them it would auto-renew, 3) we have the token and it sounds feasible that there is a migration path. Perhaps if Skyverge / woo want to create a new product they could sell it to those of us who trusted the lifecycle would not get cut short ??

I agree. This (and a few other issues) makes me think twice about using WooCommerce again. How can we trust that *any* of their extensions are safe if they are willing to abandon something like this, which is integral to the core function of our site and business. I understand technology evolves, but Woo is part of a major company – they should be required to bridge the gap when they make updates like this. Knowing they will leave their customers to fend for themselves is troubling.

Got this working on a subdomain with Siteground. Their staging environment uses domain masking techniques which break the account validation between Braintree and Woocommerce so I copied my staging site to a regular old subdomain that doesn’t use their staging environment.

Testing it out showed that, even if we were to convince all our customers to reenter their card data, there is no way for them to manage their cards within Woocommerce. Then I noticed this was reported a few months ago and marked as a bug/feature request but still hasn’t been implemented. (https://www.ads-software.com/support/topic/cant-add-payment-methods/)

It’s really disappointing we’re being forced away from the Skyverge plugin without an equally functional alternative, in addition to not having a customer data migration path.

Has anyone figured out a way to migrate yet???

I have read many posts like these, it’s clear that WooCommerce team do not care. It has made us very wary of future purchases for payment gateway plugins in the future.
We will probably use a different company/dev for future build as WC have proven that they don’t offer any additional bonus for purchasing directly from them, quite the opposite!

@duckonwater and others, version 2.0 includes a migration route. If you’re using our plugin still, please feel free to upgrade ?? If you’d switched to the PayPal Powered by Braintree v1 already after using SkyVerge Braintree, please wait until v2.0.1 (coming out shortly!), which ensures both the migration and v1 -> v2 upgrade will be run (v2.0.0 has a bug where it only ran one or the other).

Cheers! -Beka

Thanks for working it out Beka (and everybody else involved) (y)(y)(y)

I’ll be upgrading in the next month or so, hopefully all the quirks have been worked out by then.