If you plan to offer subscription payments through the PayPal platform, this guide explains how you, as the merchant, can cancel existing subscriptions.
Table of Contents
- Cancelling a PayPal Subscription as a Merchant
- Notes About Cancelling a PayPal Subscription
- Creating a PayPal Subscription Cancellation Button for the Members
- Display Active Subscription and Cancellation Option
- What Happens When a Subscription is Cancelled?
Cancelling a PayPal Subscription as a Merchant
If for any reason you need to cancel one of your members subscriptions, the following steps will help you do so.
A member may email or message you asking for you to cancel their subscription. Alternatively, they may be a problematic member and in turn you wish to terminate their subscription to the site. Follow the instruction below to cancel the subscription of any given member.
Step 1) Log into your PayPal account as a merchant. This will need to be the PayPal account attached to Simple Membership where all the payments appear.
Step 2) In another window have your WordPress dashboard opened. Click on the Simple Membership Members menu.
Step 3) Using the ‘Search‘ field in the Simple Membership Members menu, locate the member that you wish to cancel a subscription for.
Step 4) Once you have located the member, click the Edit button to view their full profile. This will take you to the Edit Member page.
Step 5) Scroll down on the Edit Member page until you see a field titled Subscriber ID/Reference. You will need to copy the member’s subscriber ID to easily locate them in your PayPal merchant account.
Step 6) Now that you have the members subscriber ID copied, within the browser where you have your PayPal account opened, click the Activity menu. Click on the Search for Transactions bar and paste in the Subscriber ID of your member. From the drop-down menu next to the search field, choose the Profile ID option.
Step 7) Click the Search Icon to locate this members subscription in your PayPal account.
Step 8) Your members subscription details will now be stated. Click to view more about this subscription.
Step 9) It is here that you will see an option to ‘Cancel‘ the subscription payments. Click this button to cancel any further subscription payments from this member.
Step 10) The members account will now become inactive. Their profile will still exist although they will not have access to any hidden content that was previously available to their membership level. You will not receive any further subscription payments from that particular member once it has been successfully cancelled.
Step 11) Notify the member that their subscription has been cancelled/terminated.
Notes About Cancelling a PayPal Subscription
- You can cancel the subscription of any of your users (who subscribed through PayPal) from your PayPal merchant account.
- Deleting a members account from the Simple Membership menu Will Not cancel their subscription payments. Please follow the instruction above to successfully cancel member subscription payment agreement.
- Cancelled subscription cannot be reactivated. The customer will need to re-subscribe if they want to.
- If you use the suspend button it will stop charging the subscriber, but keeps their subscription active for future billing. For example, a buyer might temporarily suspend a subscription while they are vacation. You can then reactivate the subscription to start charging the subscriber again.
Creating a PayPal Subscription Cancellation Button for the Members
If you want to offer a button that your members can click on to cancel subscription from their PayPal accounts, then use the following shortcode on a page:
[swpm_paypal_subscription_cancel_link merchant_id="ABC123XYZ" anchor_text="Cancel Subscription from PayPal"]
Replace “ABC123XYZ” with your actual PayPal merchant ID (you can get this value from your PayPal account).
When members click on the button created by this shortcode, they will be sent to their PayPal account where the subscription to you can be cancelled.
Display Active Subscription and Cancellation Option
We have introduced a new shortcode that displays the active subscription (if any) and a cancel button to the logged-in member. You can review the documentation for it here.
What Happens When a Subscription is Cancelled?
Read the what happens when a subscription is cancelled documentation.