Paypal Messes up old subscriptions beginning with an "S-"

If you're reading this you likely searched for "old_subscr_id". At least that is how I found this article which helped me solve my latest problem with paypal.

So what's the problem? Well paypal have decided to change the subscription numbers for existing subscription agreements.

Old subscription ids begin with "S-" and look like  "S-49541622WD5398914". New ones begin with "I-" and look a little like I-YU43BS793VG6.

That was fine, until paypal around October 25th 2018 decided to change the subscription id of existing subscriptions from the old format to a new format. And there was no way provided to give some mapping between the old and new.

Yes you have that right. The customer, paypal and the business all used the same subscripton id for the lifetime of a subscription. This was very useful, as we could all make sure we were dealing with the same paypal subscription. Paypal thought this was too uncomplicated and decided to change this.


So if you are like us, and have a business based on subscriptions, it's a little difficult to link a paypal subscription with the subscription in your database when paypal decided to change the id that was linking them.


This was a bad idea paypal. You do not change a subsciption id. We have a database of those old subscription ids and now we have no way of linking them to these new subscription ids.

Absolutely IDIOTIC.

The only way we were able to solve this was to look at the instant payment notification logs that we get from paypal. This was the only place where we could find a link between old and new subscription ids and it looks like this.

address_country_code: US
address_name: XXX
notify_version: 3.9
subscr_id: I-4876BS793VG6
payer_status: verified
business: xx@xx.com
address_country: United States
old_subscr_id: S-1HN53302FN648702V
address_city: xxx

So this was how we linked this information and solved our latest problem from paypal.

Although I'm really thinking the best solution of all is to remove paypal as a payment option. Paypal support were absolutely atrocious. Absolutely no help provided from their support.