Paypal Button grey

Hello,

Thank you for reaching out to us.

I reviewed the WooCommerce PayPal Payments documentation, and it looks like the issue is related to the PayPal plugin configuration rather than Flexible Subscriptions.

According to their documentation, in PayPal Payments → Settings → Common settings, you should enable the options shown in this screenshot:
https://woocommerce.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/image_13963a.png
These are the Save Payment Methods options.

As stated in the documentation, when this is unchecked, “The PayPal Subscriptions API is used instead, and recurring payments are processed without storing the customer’s payment method.” From what we can see, this mode appears to be designed mainly for WooCommerce Subscriptions, so it likely will not work out of the box with Flexible Subscriptions.

Please try enabling those toggles in the PayPal Payments settings and then test the subscription checkout again. After that, you should be able to place the subscription order correctly.

If you have any additional questions, please let us know.

Kind regards,

Hello,

Thank you for your message.

What PayPal shows in the popup is not always a reliable indicator by itself, because in Vaulting mode PayPal may show only the initial charge, while the recurring renewals are handled later through the saved payment method.

However, we also found that this exact behavior was previously reported for the combination of Flexible Subscriptions and WooCommerce PayPal Payments, and fixes were added in newer Flexible Subscriptions releases.

At this point, the first thing to verify is that the store is running the latest Flexible Subscriptions version and that the PayPal merchant account is fully approved for Vaulting / Reference Transactions. Without that approval, future automatic PayPal renewals may not be set up correctly.

The best next step would be to create a test subscription product, for example with a renewal period of 1 day, and place a test order for it. After completing the payment, please check whether a new subscription is created correctly under Flexible Subscriptions → Subscriptions.

It would also be good to verify whether the renewal payment is processed correctly when the next billing date is reached. This test will confirm whether the subscription is being handled properly in practice, regardless of how the initial PayPal popup is displayed.

Kind regards,