PayPal Subscriptions
Customers have the flexibility of checking out with PayPal. However, there are a few differences and limitations compared to card payments.
Limitations
The main limitation with PayPal subscriptions is that any changes to a subscription need to be confirmed by the customer via PayPal itself. This means that customers will have the ability to manage their subscription in the customer portal or via the My Orders section of Lemon Squeezy, but merchants are limited in how much they can change a subscription.
PayPal manages payment failures differently from card payments:
- Payment retries occur every 5 days, up to twice per billing cycle
- Failed payments accumulate as an outstanding balance to be charged in the next billing cycle
- Subscriptions are suspended when they reach the payment failure threshold (two failed billing cycles) For more details, visit the PayPal payment failure documentation
There are also some functional limitations outlined below:
- Discounts can not be applied to any subscription that requires a setup fee with PayPal
- PayPal can not be used as a payment method if the subscription product has usage-based billing enabled
- When updating a subscription, customers cannot change the product they are subscribed to; only the variant
- Updating subscriptions via the API is not possible for PayPal-based subscriptions. Instead, the customer can be directed to the customer portal to manage their subscription