For discussing the development and integration of subscription-enabled shops using Shopify's Subscription APIs.
Hi.
We've been having an issue with billing subscriptions that have PayPal as the payment method.
Error "Payment method was revoked" is returned for the billing attempts of these subscriptions.
We've tested with multiple PayPal accounts, so it seems like the issue is not with the individual PayPal account.
Appreciate it if someone could give me more information about this error.
(Our subscription app is on the API version 2021-01, so maybe the API version is causing the issue?)
Did you get an answer to this? This problem is still active for us, haven't been able to get any help on resolving it via the community, the internet at large, or Shopify (yet) but it's badly affecting our users.
I don't see how it could be related to an API version since all related activity would occur via Shopify Checkout, not any API calls an app would make. Unless we're supposed to do something specific to Paypal Express in response to a subscription_contracts/create webhook.
I believe I found the bug, reporting it to Shopify Partners support, but also pasting here for the community.
I believe this bug occurs when Paypal Express is enabled on a store and Reference Transactions have been denied on the account.
This is then a bug in Shopify. See: https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/payments/paypal/set-up-paypal#using-paypal-for-automatic-billing
"If you're not yet approved for Reference Transactions with PayPal, and a customer makes an order
that includes a subscription, then Shopify hides PayPal as a payment option during checkout."
In at least two stores our app is enabled on, Shopify does not in fact hide the Paypal option during checkout, but References Transactions are not approvide. This leads to the Payment method revoked error on subsequent billing charges when someone uses Paypal to check out. There's no workaround I can think of other than to catch it during dunning, which is a major inconvenience for both merchants and customers who expect a subscription to be a subscription.
Confirmed known issue by Shopify team: "Our developers are aware of this issue and we are working to solve it."