Hi @paddletroke
Thank you for reaching out and sharing your concerns.
With PayPal Subscriptions, the checkout price is fixed, as outlined in our documentation. This means that any additional costs or adjustments, such as coupons, shipping fees, or taxes, do not alter the price that was initially set when the subscription plan was created. This is because the subscription system, particularly through the PayPal button (JS SDK), doesn’t support updates to subscription details.
Has anyone actually tested woocommerce and the paypal plugin in the dev team? It’s not like Paypal is a small company!!!
PayPal Subscriptions is a feature-limited subscription integration available to every PayPal business account holder. PayPal controls the subscription and some limitations technically cannot be overcome (e.g. discounts, tax or shipping). It’s not a bug that coupons or taxing don’t work, it’s simply not possible with this implementation.
If you need a setup that allows for price adjustments in billing, including taxes, we recommend using PayPal Vaulting instead, as it provides more flexibility.
Please let me know if you need any guidance on configuring this. I’m happy to help.
Kind Regards,
Krystian
So long story short, it does not work. So if one has a woocommerce selling things with taxes (so quite a few I’d guess don’t you think?). Then he gets a total mess on his hands.
IMO this is really bad. Paypal is a huge company it should be able to support Woocommerce which is the n1 ecommerce website properly.
You can say it’s technical limitation or whatnot. But reallity is that it should just work. And it doesn’t. And my usecase is not some obscure-no-one-is-using usecase. It’s a very very very very common usecase.
What should paypal do?
- Make a PR to Woocommerce to add an option in tax settings ‘Fixed total price/Fixed net price’. Alternatively Paypal should implement this as part of their plugin. With this option, instead of the current mess Woocommerce is doing, it would be like :
- France (20%): VAT = 1X.XX€, Total = 100.00€
- Germany (19%): VAT = 1Y.YY€, Total = 100.00€
- Finland (24%): VAT = 1Z.ZZ€, Total = 100.00€
- USA (0%): VAT = 0€, Total = 100.00€
- Then you enable users to connect product to paypal only if they set ‘Fixed total price’
- Ideally if the user has at least one connected product, you do not let him change this setting.
Hello @paddletroke
The issue with taxes and subscriptions has been brought up a few times in support around 3-4 times so we are aware of it. However, it hasn’t been flagged as a widespread or urgent problem.
The main limitation comes from how PayPal Subscriptions is handled. The subscription model is managed by PayPal’s API, and as the plugin developer, we rely on their SDK, which does not currently allow modifications to the pricing structure once the subscription plan is linked to a product.
Implementing a solution like would require significant development work and investment. While this hasn’t been ruled out, there is no ETA for it at the moment—especially since there is an alternative with PayPal Vaulting.
That said, I will raise this with our product owner to explore the possibility of implementing a tax setting that includes a “fixed pricing” parameter, or some alternatives ways to prompt users about this limitation.
Let me know if you need any further clarification or assistance in the meantime.
Kind Regards,
Krystian
There is actually a way to force ‘Total fixed price’ already:
add_filter( ‘woocommerce_adjust_non_base_location_prices’, ‘__return_false’ );
