Important Note

This guide is for people using “PayPal Classic Express Checkout” with Billing Agreements enabled on their account.  If you are trying to switch from “PayPal Standard” this will not work!

Introduction

You are most likely here because you have discovered that our PayPal for WooCommerce plugin is better than other PayPal plugins available, and you would like to switch.

However, you’re using Woo Subscriptions on your website, and you have existing profiles connected to the Woo PayPal Express Checkout plugin.

If you disable that plugin and activate ours, any future subscription that Woo Subscriptions attempts to process would fail because that original gateway ID no longer exists in your site.

To resolve this, you need to update the WordPress / WooCommerce database tables so that all of the original profiles will use the proper names and values for our plugin.

Step 1 – Backup Database

Make a backup of your current database so that you may easily restore if anything should go wrong with this process.

Step 2 – Update Token Key

This will replace the original token key with the value that our plugin uses.

update wp_postmeta
set meta_key = '_payment_tokens_id'
where meta_key = '_ppec_billing_agreement_id'
and post_ID in (select ID from wp_posts where ID = wp_postmeta.post_ID and post_type = 'shop_subscription')

Step 3 – Update Gateway ID

This will replace the original gateway ID with the value that our plugin uses.

update wp_postmeta
set meta_value = 'paypal_express'
where meta_key = '_payment_method' and meta_value = 'ppec_paypal'
and post_ID in (select ID from wp_posts where ID = wp_postmeta.post_ID and post_type = 'shop_subscription')

Step 4 (Optional) – Update Gateway Title

This will replace the gateway Title with the value our plugin uses.

This would change it from PayPal Checkout to PayPal Express Checkout. You could set the title to whatever you want or just skip this step to leave it as it is.

update wp_postmeta 
set meta_value = 'PayPal Express Checkout'
where meta_key = '_payment_method_title' and meta_value = 'PayPal Checkout'
and post_ID in (select ID from wp_posts where ID = wp_postmeta.post_ID  and post_type = 'shop_subscription')

Summary

Once you have completed these steps, your system will be prepared to process future subscription payments using the Angell EYE PayPal Classic Express Checkout gateway instead of the Woo PayPal Checkout gateway.

This will allow you to remove the Woo PayPal Checkout plugin entirely since it is no longer necessary.