Developer Guide to Change Subscriptions to Manual Payments

If you need to switch a large number of subscriptions to use manual renewals, and you are proficient with PHP and/or MySQL, you can also programmatically change a subscription’s payment method to be manual.

To change a customer’s subscription via the database:

1. Find the ID of the subscription – this displays on the Manage Subscription table next to the subscription.
2. Open MySQL editor (like PhpMyAdmin).
3. Search the wp_postmeta table for a row where the post_ID is the ID found in step 1 and the meta_key is '_requires_manual_renewal'.
4. If a row is found, change the meta_value for that row to true.
5. If a row was not found in step 3, insert a row into the wp_postmeta table where the post_ID is the ID found in step 1, the meta_key is '_requires_manual_renewal' and the meta_value is true.

You can also bulk insert or update this meta data via a custom MySQL query for a batch of subscription IDs.

To change a customer’s subscription using PHP:

1. Find the ID of the subscription – this displays on the Manage Subscription table next to the subscription.
2. In you PHP code, instantiate an instance of that subscription using wcs_get_subscription( $subscription_id )
3. Call update_manual() on the subscription instance with a value of true to set the subscription to require manual renewals.