Inactive member notification when paypal fails on renewal

[jharries]

We have been using WP eMember for one year (its great) and are starting to get renewals of our members that signed up for auto-renewal through paypal subscription. Most members are getting renewed just fine, but about 25% have in some way screwed up their paypal account (expired card, invalid account, whatever) and so their renewal does not go through and eMember sets their status to “Inactive” quite properly. All good to that point.

Paypal then duns these members with reminders. But the problem is that Paypal is pretty confusing for many of our members who are not very computer savvy. And to make matters worse, Paypal support people are totally lame and tell them things like “the problem is that the site you joined (us) screwed up the credit card” when, of course, we don’t even see their credit card!

So’ I’m wondering if there is a way to automatically send those members an email offering to help and guiding them to a page on our site explaining what the problem is and how to fix it. Also, it would be way cool if we could direct them to the same page when they try to log in, the same way the expired membership logic works, but different page than that for expired members.

I have eMember 8.6.3 in case there is a way to do it in a later version.

Thanks

John

[admin]

Hi John, you should be able to use emember’s account expiry notification email system for this. You can enable this feature and then customize the email that goes out when the user’s account expires. You can explain everything in the email or bring them to a page on your site where you have the explanation. Check the “Email Settings” menu of emember for this.

You can also grab a new copy of emember too:

https://support.tipsandtricks-hq.com/forums/topic/re-install-or-load-a-fresh-build-of-the-plugins

[jharries]

That’s great, Thanks very much. I did not realize hat the expired email would work in this case.

Just one more question. I’m assuming that with an automated renewal account that if the account renews successfully through paypal they won’t get an expiry email. Do I have that right?

[admin]

Yes, you have that right.

[jharries]

Sorry, two more question/problem:

1). I have members who’s payments did not go through, due to expired credit cards at Paypal. WP eMember, quite rightly, changed their accounts to inactive. But now I have a member who has fixed the problem at PayPal and his payment just came through, about a week late. But WP eMember has not changed his account back to active. Is that right? And if so, is there any work around of fix? Keeping track of what payments are of this type and reactivating accounts manually is going to be a real nightmare. (If buying your cart software will fix his, I’m happy to do that.)

2). I see that tags don’t work in renewal emails, and I get the server load issues. Having said that, we, because we use annual renewals, only have 10 or so a day, and would really like to be able to use tags since personalization, will, I’m pretty sure, increase our retention rate. We could also use tags to show membership type and in turn, use that to make instructions easier for members to understand. Perhaps a flag could be added to give the option for using tags in renewal emails? We would be happy to pay to have this feature added.

Thanks

John

[admin]

1) When you say “the user corrected” the payment issue, did it get corrected during the retry period? Are you using the payment retry option in your PayPal button?

2) Currently, the email tags doesn’t work with emails that are sent in bulk/batch (there are a few reasons for it). We can do a custom job for you to change that behavior. Use the following form to get in touch:

https://support.tipsandtricks-hq.com/need-custom-work-done

[jharries]

1). No, the subscriber went into his paypal account and gave them a valid credit card and then paypal automatically retried the subscription payment and it was successful, (we got a notification from PayPal) however WP eMember did not change the subscription back to active. The Subscriber ID in the paypal email matches that in the the subscribers record in WP eMember, if that helps.

We know that Paypal IPN is working fine with member because other sign ups and renewals are working.

This only happens when a subscription payment initially fails (expired subscriber credit card at Paypal), and then goes through on the second or third attempt.

2). Will do.

[admin]

okay, yeah that is expected behavior. The plugin currently doesn’t wait for the user to do that. We can definitely add an option so it does.

[jharries]

Great, will that happen in a future version, or do I need to request a change? No worries if the answer is the latter, I just want to make sure we go ahead.

Thanks

John

[admin]

We will look into adding this change in a future version. Did you fill in the form by any chance?

[jharries]

That’s great. No, I have not filled in the form, but I will, as soon as I get a chance to write a detailed spec on that, and the email tag change. Should get that done in the next couple of days. Thanks for the great support, as always.

[Author]

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