If you want 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.
NOTE: This process is a little different depending on whether or not your store utilizes our Subscriptions extension. If you do, we have a few considerations you should review before switching to WooPayments.
Install and sign up for WooPayments
↑ Back to topFirst, 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. (If you’re switching from our Stripe plugin, having both gateways active simultaneously may cause some issues.)
Disable your previous payment method
↑ Back to topNOTE: Do not simply disable the the plugin used to offer your old payment gateway! If the plugin is inactive, you cannot issue refunds and perform other actions on orders that were originally placed via that payment method.
Once you have WooPayments up and running, you can disable your previous payment method as an option for customers to select at checkout.
Disabling the old payment method will prevent it from showing to customers when they place an order, but will still allow you to perform administrative tasks related to orders placed via that method, e.g. issuing refunds.
To disable your previous payment provider as an active payment method:
- Go to WooCommerce > Settings.
- Select the Payments tab.
- Find the previous payment method in the list.
- Using the three dots menu, disable the previous payment method.
Once that payment method is disabled, all new orders will use WooPayments (or any other payment gateways you still have enabled).
Waiting period
↑ Back to topWe advise leaving things as they are for at least a few months. It’s best to keep your old payments plugin active for a bit, 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.
Considerations when offering subscription products
↑ Back to topIf you are offering automatic recurring payments via the WooCommerce Subscriptions extension, 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:
- Change the existing automatically recurring subscriptions to renew manually.
- Ask the customers to log in and add a new payment method.
If you choose to do this, we suggest that you be proactive and communicate with your customers ahead of time about the upcoming change.
That said, many merchants do not want to migrate subscriptions to a new gateway if it requires some manual action on the part of their subscribers. This is usually due to a fear that any required action will cause subscriber churn.
If you do NOT want to try migrating subscribers, we advise leaving your old payments gateway active for the foreseeable future. This will allow subscribers who signed up beforehand to continue renewing using that gateway, while all of the new subscribers will pay with WooPayments. Over time, natural subscribers churn will mean that more and more of your customers will be using WooPayments.
