Does Not Support Subscriptions Out of the Box

Hi @charmedchicken

Thank you for taking the time to leave your feedback, and apologies for the misunderstanding you’ve experienced. We value your input and encourage any inquiries or concerns to be addressed directly in the dedicated plugin support forums for timely assistance.

I would like to clarify that thePayPal Payments plugin does indeed support automatic payments when integrated with the WooCommerce Subscriptions plugin. Only the Vaulting setting must be enabled to allow subscription payments:

The key aspect to note here is that your PayPal merchant account must have special permissions (Vault approval) enabled to save payment methods in the Vault, which is necessary for processing subscription payments.

The next plugin update improves the Vaulting setting and includes an experimental feature for testing to allow automatic PayPal subscription payments without requring Vault approval. So the entry barrier to sell subscriptions via PayPal will be even lower in the next feature update.

You can read more about how PayPal Payments can be used with subscriptions in the plugin documentation here: https://woocommerce.com/document/woocommerce-paypal-payments/#subscriptions-faq

We hope this information provides some clarity. We kindly ask if you could consider updating the title of your review to more accurately reflect your experience, rather than perpetuating a misunderstanding.
Thank you once again for your feedback and understanding.

Kind regards,
Niklas

I will edit it to say it doesn’t do so out of the box

Thanks, it’s much appreciated!

but a found another free plugin from a well-reviewed provider in the directory that did

Both plugins require the same level of permission from the PayPal side. The main difference is one of them has a setting that lets you enable/disable subscription functionality while the other forces it to be always on.

This information should have been front and center in the description/features or upon install.

That PayPal Payments uses Vaulting for subscriptions is mentioned in the plugin description on this repository, the plugin settings page, or the documentation here. We understand that the current Vaulting setting in the plugin does too many things at the same time and it’s easy to overlook, so it is actually receiving improvements in the upcoming update.

Also, when the testing for the new PayPal Subscriptions feature is completed, this will be defaulted on for most merchants. Only when the connected account has Vault approval (Reference Transactions), the plugin will then automatically enable PayPal Vaulting for subscriptions.

The old plugin didn’t require “vaulting”, IIRC.

That’s because none of the old or third-party PayPal plugins implement the Vaulting feature. Other PayPal plugins usually only implement basic functionality but not advanced features like Vaulting, advanced card payments, or the upcoming PayPal Subscriptions feature.

We are happy if you found a solution that works for you. PayPal Payments is always available for free if you are looking for the latest and more advanced PayPal functionality.

Kind regards,
Niklas