Testing Subscription Renewal Payments

Once you have WooCommerce Subscriptions active on your site, you may want to test an automatic subscription renewal payment using your preferred payment gateway. Here we explain how you can manually trigger the “automatic” payment process, so you won’t have to wait for an entire subscription billing period to see whether or not your payment gateway’s automatic payments are functioning as expected.

If you have not already purchased a subscription to test with, purchase a test subscription on your site using the payment gateway you wish to test. After completing the purchase, take note of the ID number assigned to the created subscription.

Now that you have a test subscription, you can trigger the renewal payment.

There are two options to carry this out:

• The “Process renewal” action in the “Edit Subscription” screen
• Manually triggering the scheduled action that processes the scheduled subscription payment

The “Process Renewal” action is the simplest method to test a renewal payment. You can take this action on the “edit subscription” screen.

When you process a renewal on a subscription using automatic payments, the subscription goes through the entire renewal process, including charging the assigned payment method and emailing the subscriber.

Note: The process renewal option only displays if:

• The subscription has a status of active
• The subscription uses a payment method that supports payment date changes

A more technical option is to manually run the scheduled action that triggers the subscription payment. To do this:

1. Visit your site’s administration dashboard.
2. Go to Tools > Scheduled Actions.
3. In the search box, enter the ID of your test subscription. Click the search button.
4. Find the row with the hook woocommerce_scheduled_subscription_payment and the status pending.
5. Hover over the row to reveal the options, and click Run.

Once you successfully triggered the renewal payment, and it processed correctly with an automatic renewal method, you will see new pending woocommerce_scheduled_subscription_payment action created for the next payment.

If there are subscriptions that appear to be active but display a renewal date in the past, it is likely due to a Cron issue on your site. These subscriptions will show a “Subscription payment overdue.” warning notice in the admin’s list view at WooCommerce > Subscriptions.

Follow these steps to troubleshoot the problem:

1. Verify that WP Cron is enabled. You can do this by accessing the status report in your WordPress admin area under WooCommerce > Status > System Status. If WP Cron is disabled, you need to re-enable it.

2. After confirming cron is enabled, and your payment gateway allows changes, try changing the next payment date of the subscription to one hour from now.
3. This triggers a new scheduled action to process a future renewal. If subscription renewals still do not process, please consult the Complete Guide to Scheduled Events with Subscriptions to further troubleshoot WP Cron.