We are in the process of migrating from our own custom made e-commerce platform to Shopify. Where at present we have a number of subscribers who subscribe to a product that get's delivered every X months, simple.
We'll need to migrate these to shopify, and we're in talks with Appstle, who require the Billing Agreement Number (ID) from our current PayPal subscribers, to migrate them over to the shopify platform.
There are insistant that we need to provide them the (B-XXX) number for each subscriber,, where at the minute, we only have the (I-XXX) subscription ID for our clients, the plan ID (P-XXX).
The shopify docs do state the B- number.
"You can associate PayPal billing agreements with the customers that you import into Shopify. Use the CustomerPaymentMethodPaypalBillingAgreementCreate mutation to associate the Shopify customer ID with the PayPal billing agreement ID.
Note Valid billing agreement IDs begin with B-."
The problem is we have no idea how we can obtain the B-XXX numbers for these subscriptions?
We've tried hitting a lot of the Paypal API's however still unable to get the B-XXX
I- profiles are subscriptions that bill automatically on a specified schedule using PayPal's Subscription engine
B- tokens are billing agreement IDs where the user has given consent (at checkout time) to be billed arbitrary amounts at arbitrary times by your system, and only when initiated by your system (PayPal does not charge B- profiles automatically)
While sometimes used to achieve similar fixed recurring charge ends, the two systems are not the same thing nor directly interchangeable/interoperable in any way. B- tokens are essentially much more powerful, and a business account must be approved by PayPal to use this feature (it's called "PayPal account reference transactions" or similar, when talking to PayPal's customer support). In some cases, a major partner such as Shopify might have permission to create billing agreements on your behalf without the PayPal account being specifically set up with this permission (I don't know those details)
But bottom line: if your new system uses B- token billing agreements, you will need to obtain them from new (customer present) checkouts and cancel any preexisting I- Subscriptions for the same product/service that are being replaced by this.
It is not possible to somehow seamlessly "obtain a B- from an I-", without the paying user's separate approval for the new B-.
The other thing to be aware of is that I- profiles will continue to bill on their own, by PayPal, automatically. Neither you old nor your new system need to be active/aware of them for them to continue working.
Manage active PayPal subscriptions in https://www.paypal.com/billing/subscriptions