Woo Subscriptions Not Renewing

I have the same problem with renewal orders failing with error code 81253. Everything is up to date and caches cleared etc. I am a customer of Angelleye as I purchased some of their other plugins. I have emailed and logged a ticket with them and awaiting a response.

Why has ‘PayPal for WooCommerce’ plugin been allowing people to subscribe when renewals will fail? This is a disaster! I have lost $1000’s in monthly recurring revenue. What’s going to happen with my subscribers on an annual plan? Will their renewal work if I manage to get PayPal to enable reference transactions in time?

Enabling reference transactions is not easy. PayPal need a tonne of information before they even consider it and then they say it’s 7-10 days. Young businesses are not going to have this – see below for what PayPal said:

“Reference Transactions are one of our riskiest products as it allows you to change the amount and frequency of the payments being taken. As this carries such a high risk it is not something that we offer all merchants.

In line with this, please complete the following information so that we can submit an application for Reference Transactions on your behalf. Once the information has been submitted, it may take 7 to 10 days to have this approved.

Profit and Loss accounts for the last two years
Balance sheets for the last two years
Business name
Business legal name (if different)
Trading Name
Place of Registration
Company Number
Are your items in stock or do you operate by drop shipping?
Business URL
Sales venues
Date Business Established
Date Started Trading
Delivery timeframe
How are goods shipped?
Primary Suppliers Information
Products/Services that are sold
Total Online Volume for your business annually
What percentage of this does PayPal Currently Process?
Average transaction price
Business rationale as to why you are applying for reference transactions.
A link to the sign up flow for customers
A link to the T&CS where customers can review the terms regarding reference transactions and the cancellation policy surrounding them
Will there be additional payments being processed by PayPal if reference transactions are approved?
If reference transactions will be used for subscription payments please provide a volume split in terms of the various subscription options. For example – what percentage of volume will be for daily, monthly and/or annual subscriptions?
If you need to bill users varying amounts, is this reflected in the Terms and Conditions for the provision of service on the website? If not please have it added. You must also include how to cancel reference transactions.”

@mrfm, The plugin provides an admin notice warning you that you need to enable billing agreements in Express Checkout if you plan on using it with Woo Subscriptions. Do you see that message in your admin panel? If not, you must have dismissed the message at some point.

We can certainly try to make that information more prominent, and we did just recently make some adjustments to admin notices to make them stand out a little more in the 1.4.8 update. Unfortunately, any orders that were created without billing agreements enabled means no Billing Agreement ID would have been saved in the Woo token data, which is why the renewals are failing.

I’m sorry I don’t have better news for you about the existing orders, but if you go ahead and get BA’s enabled then everything will be fine from that point forward. Again, we’ll try to adjust our admin notices, documentation, and make a YouTube video that educates people on this to hopefully avoid the issue in the future.

I see no such warning and I did not dismiss one so please don’t assume. I believe that billing agreements are already enabled in my PayPal account because when I use the standard PayPal checkout I can see that it creates a subscription in PayPal. But with your plugin and PayPal Express checkout, nothing is created.

Or are you talking about the option ‘Enable Tokenized Payments’ (totally different name) in Express Checkout settings? It says this is Currently considered BETA for Express Checkout so how would I know if I should enable that?

If I should check something please provide clear instructions how to do so.

When I switched back to the standard PayPal checkout I started getting the message ‘PayPal Reference Transactions are not enabled on your account’, which led me here. But I believe this message is not from your plugin.

So what am I to do?

Woo Subscriptions with PayPal Standard used to create actual PayPal subscription profiles. This is why you would see that show up that way inside the PayPal account. WooCommerce then added token payment functionality, and that’s when they adjusted Woo Subscriptions to use reference transactions instead of subscription profiles because this provides greater flexibility. These do not show up as subscriptions in your account, though. Woo uses the token payment system to process “subscription” payments, and that’s the same thing we did with Express Checkout. In either case, you have to get billing agreements enabled on the account in order for that to work.

The token payment option you see in the settings is for Woo token payments, too, but that option is so that buyers can choose to save their payment method to their account for quicker checkout in the future. This would not be related to subscription orders. Woo Subscription orders would tokenize the payment regardless of whether that option was enabled, but only if billing agreements are enabled on the PayPal account.

So what you need to do at this point is get PayPal to enable billing agreements / reference transactions on your account. You’ll need to go through the procedures that they gave you in order to get that done.

Thanks for the advice. I was not sure if billing agreements / reference transactions were the same thing.

So to be clear, all my 100’s of existing subscriptions that went through PayPal Express are effectively now dead and I must ask all customers to re-subscribe – either when reference transactions are enabled or by using PayPal Standard?

Unfortunately, yes, that seems to be the case. Without a BAID on file the future payments will not process, and the only way to get a BAID on file is for the buyer to go through the agreement process. ??

PayPal Standard with Woo Subscriptions works at a basic level, but if you want any of their advanced features you’ll still have to get reference transactions enabled. They have a detailed document about all of this here: https://docs.woocommerce.com/document/subscriptions/faq/paypal-reference-transactions/

Thank you for your support!

My reply removed and I made a new thread here: https://www.ads-software.com/support/topic/paypal-express-with-woocommerce-subscriptions/

• This reply was modified 6 years, 7 months ago by mrfm.
• This reply was modified 6 years, 7 months ago by mrfm.