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  3. WooPayments: Subscriptions /
  4. What happens to my subscriptions if I disable the WooPayments gateway?

What happens to my subscriptions if I disable the WooPayments gateway?

With WooPayments, there are potentially two ways to sell subscription products:

See this document for a comparison between the two, as well as information on why the Stripe Billing feature might not be available for you.

This document explains what happens to subscriptions when the WooPayments gateway is disabled in the settings. It does not cover what happens if you deactivate the WooPayments plugin itself.

Existing subscriptions

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Disabling the WooPayments gateway only affects the payment options displayed in the WooCommerce checkout form. Because existing subscriptions renew automatically without going through the checkout form, they will not be affected.

In other words, existing subscribers will continue to renew via WooPayments without issue. This applies to all subscriptions that renew automatically, regardless of whether or not you use the Woo Subscriptions extension in conjunction with WooPayments.

If you use Woo Subscriptions and have any subscribers that renew manually, they will still be able to renew using any payment gateway that remains enabled.

New subscriptions

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Using WooPayments only

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When using the built-in subscriptions feature of WooPayments, subscription purchases can only be processed via WooPayments. Other payment gateways will not be available during checkout when a subscription product is in the cart.

For this reason, if WooPayments is installed and active, but disabled as a gateway, customers with subscription products in their cart will see a notice saying that there are no available payment methods which support subscriptions.

This is obviously a bad experience for your customers, so to allow them to purchase subscription products again, you will either need to:

Using WooPayments and Woo Subscriptions

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If you disable WooPayments as a gateway with subscription products in your store and Woo Subscriptions installed, customers will still be able to purchase them so long as you have at least one other active payment gateway that supports subscriptions.

These subscriptions will use the on-site Woo Subscriptions billing engine.