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Paypal Automatic Subscriptions

Updated Sep 28, 2025

Plans available*: Skyrocket

*Note: This feature is only available on the Skyrocket Simplero plan (or the deprecated Rule The World Plan). Lower plans include only manual PayPal subscriptions, which means that customers will receive an email to pay before each payment date. 

 If you’re looking for help connecting your PayPal account to Simplero in the first place, check out our separate PayPal Setup guide. Here, we’ll focus only on the automatic subscriptions: understanding how PayPal handles automatic recurring payments and the key limitations to keep in mind.

Turning On PayPal Automatic Subscriptions

PayPal subscription options can be found in the settings - Payment Processor settings. 

Click on the edit (pencil) button next to your PayPal payment processor.

Change the setting when making a purchase involving a subscription or installments to "Set up a payment plan in PayPal, if possible":

Paypal Subscriptions Limitations

While PayPal is available for Subscription prices too, there are a few limitations you will need to know before offering this payment processor as a method of payment on subscription plans:

  • Once the purchase has been created, you will not be able to edit or add any existing/additional charges. When a new purchase is generated, the price settings are sent to PayPal, which will now handle the subscription renewals and report back to us when they have been successful or canceled.

  • Admins won’t be able to turn auto-renew off when using PayPal subscriptions. It needs to be done through PayPal. 

  • When you or the member cancels and/or refunds a PayPal purchase, Simplero sends the request to PayPal to update the cancellation and refund request on their end. This action should mark the automatic payment in PayPal stopping future charges.

  • Once a member cancels the purchase on PayPal, there is no option to reactivate it. If the customer wants to restart the subscription, they will need to purchase the product again.

  • Subscription purchases need to be created with Paypal from the first payment to automatically collect the payments. When a purchase is changed from another payment method to Paypal, payments can only be manually collected (ie. sending an email each month)

  • Subscriptions used with PayPal must have 2 or fewer subscription periods and only the final one may repeat.

  • You can't automatically collect installments with PayPal 

For example, the price below will be accepted by PayPal:

While this one won't:

When the price doesn't support PayPal as a processor, we will not show it as an available method of payment on the product order form :)


Considerations when setting up a Subscription Price

Learn more about setting it up in our guide, 'Subscription Prices'. If you want your price to be used for PayPal subscription, take the following into account: 

  •  A maximum of two paid periods can be added for PayPal Subscriptions to be available (as explained in the limitations above)
  • If you choose to limit the payment processors that can be used, since PayPal Subscriptions is considered an automatic payment processor, all three options (Unrestricted, Automatic charge only, and No cash/bank transfer) will allow using PayPal as a payment method.