Cancelling A PayPal Subscription As A Vendor

Cancelling a PayPal subscription if you are a buyer isn’t that hard, but if you are a merchant it’s far from obvious.

We ran into the issue a few times in recent months, so we contacted PayPal’s support team. They happily informed us that the only way a subscription could be cancelled was if the buyer cancelled it from their end.

Of course a lot of buyers either don’t know how or simply forget to do it, so we were still getting calls about the issue.

I called Paypal again this afternoon and spoke to a very helpful guy in their Dublin offices who walked me through the steps to cancel a subscription from the merchant’s end.

It’s quite simple once you know how.

Login to your Paypal account and click on the “History” tab.
In the “show” dropdown choose “subscriptions” and set the start date to some date in the past. You may need to go back quite a bit, as the history section only shows the subscription creation date and not any subsequent payments from the client.
Once you’ve found the subscription you want to cancel click on the “details” link. You should now see an option to “cancel subscription”. Then click on it and confirm that you really do want to cancel the subscription.
You should receive a confirmation email within a couple of minutes.

Now if only they’d told us that when we first asked!