Deactivate plugin with active subscriptions

Hi @noihs,

That depends on how your subscription was initially created. For example, with the previous PayPal Standard integration, subscriptions exist at PayPal regardless of whether or not the Standard gateway is active. PayPal generates renewal payments and then only sends a status update to WooCommerce to “mirror” the subscription on the site.

But with PayPal Payments, the subscription exists only in WooCommerce and not at PayPal. PayPal Payments saves a payment method in a secure Vault. WooCommerce Subscriptions creates the renewal order and then charges the vaulted payment method at PayPal.
When PayPal Payments (or Vaulting in the plugin settings) is disabled, then it will no longer be possible to charge the PayPal account because there would be no “access key” for the Vault anymore.
The saved payment method would still exist within the Vault, but it is essentially locked and you couldn’t access the funds.

Kind regards,
Niklas

The safest method for the moment would be to keep the checkbox for Enable the PayPal Gateway checked and Vaulting enabled so that the actual gateway is active from a WooCommerce perspective.

You could then disable all of the buttons with the settings for:
Enable buttons on Checkout/Single Product/Cart/Mini Cart
https://woocommerce.com/document/woocommerce-paypal-payments/#button-on-checkout

This will effectively remove PayPal Payments from the store front-end while the Vaulting and subscription renewal logic should continue to work in the background. We are looking into options that could allow disabling the entire gateway without affecting subscription functionality. But in most cases, the effective end result should be the same with the approach mentioned above.
I hope this helps!

Kind regards,
Niklas