Switching to WooPayments from another payment gateway

If you would like to stop using your existing payment gateway and switch to WooPayments instead, this document describes how to do that with as little disruption as possible to your site and your customers.

First, install and sign up for WooPayments as shown in our Startup Guide.

After you finish signing up, WooPayments will be active and able to take payments right alongside the your existing payment gateway.

Once you’ve successfully created a WooPayments account, you can disable your previous payment method as an option for customers to select at checkout.

Disabling your old payment method in WooCommerce will prevent that payment method from displaying to customers when they place an order, but — more importantly — it will still allow you to perform administrative tasks related to managing old orders, like issuing refunds.

To disable your previous payment provider as an active payment method:

1. Go to WooCommerce > Settings.
2. Select the Payments tab.
3. Click the All payment methods section at the top.

4. Find the previous payment method in the list.
5. In the Enabled column, toggle it off.

Once that payment method is disabled, all new orders will use WooPayments (or any other payment gateways you still have enabled).

Next, we advise leaving things as they are for at least a couple of months. It’s best to keep your old payment plugin active for few months even after you’ve disabled it as a payment method in the event that you need to perform some actions via that payment gateway.

After some time has passed, and refund requests for orders that were originally placed via your old payment method are unlikely, you can go ahead and deactivate the plugin under Plugins > Installed Plugins.

If you are offering automatic recurring payments via Woo Subscriptions, moving those customers with active subscriptions from one payment gateway to another often requires some action on their part. The most consistent way of ensuring that customers are billed correctly is to:

1. Change the existing automatically recurring subscriptions to renew manually.
2. Ask the customers to log in and add a new payment method.

As such, it’s important to:

• Be proactive and communicate with your customers ahead of time.
• Adjust the subscriptions’ settings properly to make the transition as easy as possible for your customers.

If you have a small number of subscribers, you may be able to perform these tasks by hand. If your subscriber base is large, we suggest using AutomateWoo to perform these tasks all at once.

You can prepare an email to send out to your customers before modifying any of their subscription settings. This will give you and your customers time to adjust to the changes.

When crafting this email, you should inform them that:

1. Their subscriptions will soon be set to renew manually as a part of the switching process.
2. They must log into the site immediately after receiving the message and update their payment method.
   • Updating their payment method will resume automatic payments going forward with minimal disruption.

For convenience, your email should include a link to the My Account > Subscriptions page. By default, this page can be found at this URL:

https://www.example.com/my-account/subscriptions/

Providing this URL in the email will help customers go directly to their dashboard and update the payment methods on their subscriptions.

Now that you have your email prepared and ready to send to subscribers, it’s time to set their subscriptions to renew manually. To do this:

1. If it isn’t already, enable Accept Manual Renewals at WooCommerce > Settings > Subscriptions and save your settings.
2. Go to WooCommerce > Subscriptions in your dashboard.
3. Find a subscription that uses the old payment method, like so:

4. Click the subscription ID number to edit the subscription.
5. In the Billing section, click the pencil icon.

6. In the Payment Method dropdown, select Manual Renewal.
7. Click the Update button to save the subscription.
8. Repeat those steps for every subscription that uses your previous payment gateway for renewals.

Now that you’ve set all the appropriate subscriptions to renew manually, you can send the email (or run the AutomateWoo workflow) you prepared in the previous section.

This email will prompt all your subscribers to log in and quickly update their payment method in order to avoid the hassle of renewing manually in the future.