Customer cannot cancel recurring payment – reinstated by merchant

Hello @pendle666

I don’t think that the affected buyers canceled their subscriptions on the PayPal side. If a subscription is canceled directly from the PayPal account, this is considered a hard cancellation, and it shouldn’t be possible to reactivate. Not by the buyer or the merchant. That’s a final action.

Reactivation of those subscriptions would cause this error in logs:

Could not active subscription product on PayPal. SUBSCRIPTION_STATUS_INVALID  Invalid subscription status for activate action; subscription status should be suspended.

What likely happened is that the customers used the “Cancel“ option in the My-Account area of your WooCommerce site. In reality, this does not trigger a hard cancellation at PayPal. Instead, it may initiate a Pause (or Suspension) of the subscription, which only stops future payments temporarily. A paused subscription can still be Reactivated by the merchant. A subscription can be reactivated in two ways: either by clicking “Reactivate” in the subscriptions dashboard or by manually changing the subscription status to “active.” Both methods will trigger the reactivation.

Of course, strange things can happen, so I tried to reproduce the issue myself. However, no matter what changes I made to the order status, it didn’t have any effect on the PayPal dashboard status. I just wanted to double-check and be sure.

We’d need to check the order notes of the affected subscriptions. Please share the order notes; they are on the right side of the screen. Screenshots would be great, especially the timeline section showing status changes and system messages.

Alternatively, if you have logging enabled, that would give us the best insight into what happened. But without the system report, I can’t confirm if it is enabled. Please share your full system status report so we can check further. Here’s how to do it:

1. Go to WooCommerce → Status in your WordPress admin.
2. Click Get system report, then click Copy for support.
3. Paste the full report into our secure PrivateBin.
4. Once done, share the PrivateBin link here so we can review it.

We’ll wait for those details to continue the investigation.

Kind Regards,
Krystian

Hello @pendle666

It’s 9 hours before the end date, so I’ll know tomorrow what’s happened.

Yeah, that might clarify the situation a bit.

In case of further problems we’ll need logs from a few timeframes:

• Covering the entire period where the reactivation may have occurred.
• When the customer(s) attempted to cancel their subscription.
• Any date where a renewal order was created even though the subscription was supposed to be canceled.
• The dates when you(?) manually reactivated the subscription, if you did.

I understand that it might be hard to pinpoint these dates precisely, so the best option would be to send us all recent logs, or if you have any idea of the timeframe, just let us know, and we’ll focus on that. Also, please feel free to upload the screenshots of the subscriptions along with any related order notes. The more details we have, the easier it will be to identify what’s going on.

If you prefer not to share this information publicly, we recommend contacting us directly through our support form so we can assist you more closely. You can open a ticket here: Request Support

Make sure to include the link to this thread in your request so we can follow up quickly.

Kind Regards,
Krystian