Upcoming Change to PayPal Subscriptions

[MTS_Ciaran]

PayPal is making changes to the way Subscriptions are created, managed, and displayed. For additional information, see our article Why am I seeing changes to how Subscriptions are reflected?

[auctionstealer]

So in reference to this statement:

What field is deprecated in the merchant profile page for I- Subscriptions?
The item_number and custom_number will not be shown in the merchant profile page for I- Subscriptions.

Is there a way to access the item_number from within our PayPal accounts at all?  Will we still be able to see it on the Subscription Details page?  If not, what info will be displayed ( custom field )?  We just want to make sure we still can identify the subscription product from paypal.com when looking at a subscription directly.

Thanks in advance!

[HenryGe]

The message is hard to be read and understood.

As a developer, I just want to know:

should I convert all subscription id with S-xxx in the database to I-xxx?

will the change affect my IPN script? should I change the IPN logic?

any official's help?

I have to say paypal is getting worse year by year.

80% of customer choose paypal to pay recurring payments 2 years ago, but now only 20% choose paypal, 80% choose stripe.

[MTS_Ciaran]

@HenryGe - No, you do not need to convert everything. existing subscriptions will stay as S- for the time being. New subscriptions being created will have I- so you will need to support both formats. 

The only logic you need to code for is in the subscr_payment IPN, the transaction_subject variable will work like this:

• in case of S-: transaction_subject has 'custom_code' value
• in case of I- : transaction_subject has the 'item_name' related to the subscription

[docdunning]

So let me get this straight.  The opening post suggests that "I-" subscriptions do not generate an EOT transaction through IPN.  If that's so, I'm going to have to change my site logic to allow people who cancel, to continue through the rest of their prepaid term. 

If someone's on an annual recurring sub, and cancels after 9 months, they still have 3 months to go after the cancel.  At the moment I remove their access with the EOT which handily arrives at the end of the term.

Has this all changed?  I noticed the other day that PayPal Sandbox didn't send an EOT but I didn't realise why.

[MTS_Ciaran]

@docdunning No, EOT IPN message will be generated for merchants that currently use S- subscriptions. So this will continue to work as usual for the new I- ID's

[docdunning]

Sorry, I'm still not sure about this.  Subscriptions on my site have been I-xxx since January 2016.  I have never had S-xxx subscriptions.  I've been getting EOT without any problem throughout.

After these new changes, will I still get EOT?

[MTS_Ciaran]

@docdunning - Yes, if you're already using I- then this does not apply to you. This change only applied to S- Subscriptions. So no change on what you are using. 

[mikewz]

Was this change rolled out yesterday (15th March)?

I ask because we are still seeing new subscriptions being created with the "S-XXX" style.

[MTS_Ciaran]

Not yet, postponed until April 30th now. 

[mikewz]

@MTS_Ciaran Thanks - I had a few questions I was hoping someone may be able to help with:

1. Is there a Sandbox we can use to test these upcoming changes in a development environment (to simulate the IPN's etc)?
   
   
2. Are any updates required to our existing PayPal button code (generated previously from the PayPal site)?
   
   
3. Where will the status for this migration be posted (so we can check for progress, issues etc)?