Renewing a PayPal payment method from a migration

In short

If you brought your subscriptions to Kyvento from another platform, your customers' PayPal payments continue to run on an older PayPal agreement. It works unchanged – collection happens just as before. You can offer your customers the option to renew their payment method at their convenience, but you do not have to.

For your customers: nothing is broken

When a customer sees a note in their customer portal saying they can renew their PayPal payment method, it does not indicate a problem:

• Their payment method works. Nothing has expired, nothing is invalid, nothing needs fixing.
• They do not have to do anything. If they ignore the note, nothing changes: their subscription continues, collection continues, and there is no reminder and no restriction.
• If they do renew, it takes a moment and changes nothing else – same plan, same date, same amount. They confirm once with PayPal, and everything continues as before.

If a customer asks, that is the whole answer: it is an offer, not a request.

The switch in your settings

Under “Settings” → “Payments” → “PayPal” you will find the switch “Offer customers in the portal to renew their payment method”. It is off by default.

• Off: your customers see nothing of it. Everything runs as before.
• On: customers who actually hold a migrated PayPal payment method see the note on their subscription. Everyone else still sees nothing – anyone who has long since stored a card is not addressed.

Regardless of the switch, a customer is pointed to the option after a plan change. The same applies there: at that point the change has already been carried out in full. If the customer cancels out, it stays that way – the change is not waiting on anything.

Why there is a second set of PayPal credentials

In the same section you will see three additional fields: API username, API password and API signature. The section only appears if you actually have migrated PayPal subscriptions.

These are not the client ID and secret from above. They come from the same PayPal account but are created separately – PayPal lists them in its account settings under the API access credentials for the classic interface. If you enter the values from above by mistake, PayPal reports an authentication error.

Kyvento needs these credentials for exactly one purpose: to end a migrated payment agreement with PayPal when one of your customers requests deletion of their data. They are not used for collection – that runs through the same interface as any other PayPal payment method.

Store them before the first customer requests a deletion. If they are missing at that moment, Kyvento cannot end the agreement with PayPal, and the deletion request stays pending until the credentials are there.

What happens to the old payment method

When a customer renews, their new PayPal payment method takes the place of the old one. The old one is not deleted: it remains visible to you and is marked as superseded. That way a chargeback arriving weeks later against an old payment can still be matched.

Your customer sees none of this – their portal shows exactly one PayPal payment method, the current one.

Next steps

• Set up PayPal and complete the webhooks — see Integrating PayPal
• What happens on a chargeback — see Recording a chargeback manually