Is Paypal retiring Auto Bill and how does that effect my customers on auto bill?

[Murray_Rushmore]

Today I saw this message in my Recurring Payments Dashboard

"PayPal will be retiring Auto Billing from our suite of recurring payments products on January 31st, 2023. Merchants will not be able to use Auto Billing to receive payments after January 31st, 2023. If you use the Auto Billing product, please sign up for PayPal’s Subscription management product to continue receiving payments after 31st January 2023."

"Please be aware any customers currently signed up for recurring payments using the Auto Billing product will need to create new Subscription billing plans to prevent disruption in service and that you may need to reach out to your customers to manage any outstanding payments that were enabled by Auto Billing."

Does this actually mean I am going to need to contact all of my individual customers and have them sign up for an entirely new auto pay subscription by January 31st?

[Ivan_dav]

I think it's only for Auto Billing (Automatically billed payments), not for subscriptions.

Also I got answer in the topic
https://www.paypal-community.com/t5/Sandbox-Environment/Auto-Billing-is-shut-down/m-p/3023619 

[algo_coder45]

They are providing conflicting information. Their actual technical team told me the APIs I shared in my last post are going away at the end of this month and I triple checked with them. I'm waiting on a call back today based on an escalation with a supervisor yesterday. I'll share what I hear back, but I would highly suggest escalating as well so multiple customers show concern and we can get clear information from them.

[SocialBlade]

Just found out about this going away last night when looking for a way to cancel/refund a pending payment for a customer (doesn't appear to be a way but that is irrelevant to this post).

Anyway while clicking around on the subscription I clicked a link that went to the OLD subscription info page https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_merchant-hub and on that page I saw the message about Auto Billing going away at the end of the month.

I just got off a 78 minute call with PayPal support, and then a manager where they weren't fully aware of the situation either.  The manager I spoke with found out that emails were supposed to have gone out to all customers about this on Nov 7th 2022 but he confirmed looking through my account that I never was sent the email.  Was it because I wasn't effected? No one knows. I just got lucky that I clicked on a link and ended up on their old dashboard where it showed at the top, otherwise I'd never have known until Feb 1st came around.

(Side note: We have customers all over the world. A similar situation happened in Sept/Oct 2021 where all India payments started failing and PayPal support then too had no idea about why this was happening until starting to dig)

Anyway I'm still at this point not even sure I am effected. PayPal seemed to go back and forth on this.  We have been creating subscriptions since around 2016 for one of four plans (+ annual option). They all show up in the NEW subscriptions dashboard https://www.paypal.com/billing/subscriptions which is what I typically use, just with the exception that they are planless. As in I'm pretty sure when we created our integration plans didn't exist so we just manually label it a plan name (same name for everyone) when the subscription is created.

What our current plan is, ASAP create plans and start having new customers sign up via the new system. PayPal confirmed that this is the correct thing to do. 

What I don't know about though is what happens to the thousands of existing subscriptions. Will they still work?  The manager didn't know and opened a support ticket with a 3 day response time to find out.

At the end of the day I am pretty outraged at the lack of communication, lack of migration support, and 3 week timeline to build a new solution and notify thousands of customers to get them to switch to a new payment method.  PayPal doesn't even know for sure if they need to.  PayPal should either provide an easy way to map or assign existing subscriptions over to a plan, or provide ample time to allow us to communicate to customers that they need to switch and give them time to do so too.

I have requested a six month extension on the timeline and I highly suggest everyone else does as well. I have a strong feeling that the majority of people who will be effected by this don't even know about this yet if they haven't stumbled to the old dashboard like we did and seen this.  I know this effects a big chunk of reoccurring revenue for us. I imagine it does for many many others as well.  I think a six month extension is a tiny ask in order to get things migrated over fully since in effect I only had 3 weeks notice and others might have 0 notice until it stops working.

[algo_coder45]

Thanks for sharing. Our process is very similar to yours, as described here: 

Anyway I'm still at this point not even sure I am effected. PayPal seemed to go back and forth on this.  We have been creating subscriptions since around 2016 for one of four plans (+ annual option). They all show up in the NEW subscriptions dashboard https://www.paypal.com/billing/subscriptions which is what I typically use, just with the exception that they are planless. As in I'm pretty sure when we created our integration plans didn't exist so we just manually label it a plan name (same name for everyone) when the subscription is created.

I would think these subscriptions would continue to work since they're showing up in this "new" Subscriptions section, although it's important for PayPal to clearly confirm this. PayPal makes money when our profiles successfully process credit card payments, so it would make zero sense if they kill all these recurring profiles without a plan to automatically migrate them to ensure they continue to successfully process. 

Our plan is like yours. We're frantically coding a solution to use their Subscriptions APIs for new payments, but we have no clear plan for existing recurring profiles since we'd like confirmation from PayPal before doing anything drastic such as contacting thousands of customers to do something they don't need to do.

I called again to follow-up with a supervisor since they never called me back like they said they would. I hope to hear back by tomorrow and will share what I learn with you all.

[DebKDM]

I have just spoken to Customer Care, after being given the run-around for days by people who didn't know the answer, and Conrad in Customer Care said categorically that 'Subscriptions' would NOT be affected.

There seems to be some confusion with the tech team and some customer care personnel where they think that all recurring payments are the same, and all recurring payments are being retired. Conrad knew right away "Subscriptions ARE NOT affected, it is only Auto Billing which is being retired" he gave me a cast iron guarantee that whatever anyone else may say, they might not be as familiar with the different kinds of recurring payments, and subscriptions will remain active. Which is the only thing that made sense given the amount of money in fees PayPal would lose if they killed everyone's subscriptions (and businesses!)

Hope this info puts people's minds at rest because I've really dug deep into it, and pushed and pushed until I spoke to someone who had absolute clarity on the different recurring payment services. Phew! I can sleep again!

[Murray_Rushmore]

I am really hoping you are right, and I agree, it makes zero sense for Paypal to cut off all these existing subscriptions that generate tons and tons of fees for them. 

I say this because they'd HAVE to know that each of us reaching out to every single customer on auto pay, and asking them to resign up to a new subscription, would result in the loss of LOTS of revenue, both for the individual business AND Paypal itself? 

Then again, sometimes weird things happen. 

My remaining question is, what's the difference between "auto bill", "recurring payments", and subscriptions, if any?

My dashboard is called "recurring payments", but when I click on the individual customers, it calls them a "subscription". IE, every customer has a "subscription" and is, of course, auto billed at a set rate every month. 

Does anyone have a clearer understanding than me? 

Also, I really appreciate the discussion from y'all. Thank you. 

[DebKDM]

My understanding of it, and I’ve really looked into this, is that ‘recurring payments’ is the term used for any of the recurring payment services offered by PayPal. This covers ‘subscriptions’, ‘auto billing’ and ‘instalment plans’. Auto billing is the one they are retiring. Auto billing is where someone sets a billing limit each month, and you can bill them each month, any random amount up to that limit for your product or service. So you manually trigger the bill, and it automatically pays you from the customer’s chosen funding source. Subscriptions (which is what my company uses, and what I’ve been stressing like hell about) is just that, a set monthly subscription that automatically processes at the same amount and the same time every month. An instalment plan is a plan set up to allow the customer to pay for a product or service in instalments, rather than one lump sum. The only thing that’s affected according to every bit of official info I can find, is the auto billing, and customer care assured me that ONLY auto billing is being retired, and all other recurring payment methods remain unaffected. Which means our subscriptions will remain live and we get to stay afloat!

[SocialBlade]

Adding more to @DebKDM's messages I think at least a lot of us are PROBABLY ok.  I called PayPal again today to see if I could get any more info and they also noted the product in question that is going away is the one utility providers/etc use.  It's when a customer authorizes say a max of $1000 to be charged each month but the exact amount isn't known then. The merchant charges the customer based on usage each month.  

To make things even simpler I wish they'd update the page https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_merchant-hub where we all saw this saying the actual product that is going away is the "Enhanced Recurring Payments, Automatic Billing" product.  (This was confirmed by the customer support rep I spoke with to be the actual product. See screen shots below) So as long as you don't subscribe to this service for $19.99/mo you SHOULD be unaffected.  They obviously know who is using this product too and could just not show the message at all to people not using it...  

They advised me to be 100% sure to open a support ticket at https://paypal.com/mts so I've done that as well, but I THINK we should be in the clear.  I'll update once I hear back from Merchant Technical Support.

[Murray_Rushmore]

Yes, yes indeed. 

After posing this question initially, I had called, and received this exact same information. It was automatic payments (called "auto billing") that VARY from month to month from things like utility bills that were being retired. 

Lol, after that phone call, during which the really nice dude from Paypal was like, "Yes, we've got quite a few calls about this today, and they worded it very poorly. Your account does SUBSCRIPTIONS, and is just fine." 

I tripled checked, and when our customers sign up, they are clicking a button that does indeed say "Subscribe". 

I feel much better that we are all okay. 

Should I still open a support ticket just to be safe? Hmmmm.

[PayPal_Bindu]

Hello everyone,

Thank you for joining our community help forum!

I am happy to help you with your inquiry about automatic billing here. I would like to inform that subscriptions and auto billing are two different things. Automatic billing refers buyers agreeing to pay automatically when sellers bill them. PayPal does not collect payments from buyers until seller initiate a monthly bill.

Subscription/automatic payments authorizes a merchant to charge you whenever you make a purchase on their website without signing in to your PayPal account. This is something that's set up on the first checkout with the merchant. 

I hope this information helps!

Bindu