Hello Bill,
Thank you for reaching out to us, and for the detailed breakdown of the meta fields you observed.
For WooCommerce subscription recurring payments, the plugin requires only the mandate ID, stored on the subscription as _gocardless_mandate_id (the value must begin with MD). When a renewal is due, the gateway constructs the GoCardless payment from that mandate together with the subscription’s own amount and currency, none of the other meta fields are read during this process.
Accordingly, the remaining fields do not need to be populated for your migration:
_gocardless_billing_request* pertain solely to the initial checkout flow and are not referenced on renewals._gocardless_payment* are written automatically after each charge, so there is nothing to seed._gocardless_mandate is stored as array( 'id' => 'MD...' ). You may set it to match for consistency, but it is not the value used when taking renewal payments.
Please also ensure that the payment method is set to GoCardless (gocardless) on each subscription, so that WooCommerce Subscriptions triggers the charge correctly.
We would recommend setting the mandate ID via the Edit Subscription screen (Billing → payment method fields), which validates the MD format on save. As a precaution, we would also advise testing the complete flow on one or two records before processing all 600.
Please let us know if any further detail would be helpful. Thanks!
Genius – that’s great news. I have a test environment and will try out a daily subscription in the GCL sandbox and watch what happens.
Sounds like a great plan. Please don’t hesitate to reach out if you run into anything unexpected, and we’d be glad to hear how the test goes.
Best regards,
