Linking PayPal Subscriptions During Migration to to eStore / eMember

[lkinca]

Hi guys, I was unable to find any info on this, so am posting here.

I have been standard PayPal buttons to sell subscriptions to my site. (All users have access to the same stuff).

But now I moving to an eStore/eMember set up and have a questions about handling my existing users. The question is, what do I need to do in the customer set up to ensure that if a user cancels eStore gets properly notified?

Here is what I have done.

1. Added membership levels to eMember.

2. Added existing customers to proper membership level based on subscription purchased.

3. Added a customer record for each subscription and linked it to eMember user by adding eMember user ID to customer record.

There is a ‘transaction id’ field in the customer record that, in sandbox testing, was filled with the actual transaction ID when a purchase was made. This id was all numerals.

However, PayPal also provides a subscription ID that starts with the format I-############. It seems this is the id that eStore would need to discuss actual subscriptions with PayPal, but there does not seem to be a place to enter it.

Any ideas on how to ensure I have entered the proper data to handle cancellations, missed payments, etc.?

Thanks in advance for any assistance.

[amin007]

Don’t worry about the existing customers as the cancellation for those subscription will still be handled by the ipn handling script that is included in eMember (you are not blocking this off). So when their subscription ends PayPal will notify eMember and eMember will deactivate their account.

You simply setup eStore and the new members will start to use the new process and for these new payment everything will be handled via eStore.

[lkinca]

Thanks for the response.

Unfortunately I don’t think it is going to be that easy though. I had my PayPal account set create user names and passwords for my users and they were using that to log in to software. (This is only available if auto-return and PDT are disabled for your Paypal account).

The reason we got eMember/eStore is so we could have users subscribe to a membership level and let eMember/eStore mange the subscriptions. We had switch to the auto-return option and now our software checks the eMember database during activation checks. It seems to be working great…but not sure how to handle cancellations for existing users…any hints on what data is used in the conversation between PayPal and eMember to handle these deactivations? Is there something I should be checking eMember profiles for to ensure PayPal can talk to it?

[amin007]

Weren’t you using the PayPal button and eMember integration explained on this page?

http://www.tipsandtricks-hq.com/wordpress-membership/how-to-use-a-simple-paypal-payment-button-to-accept-membership-payment-146

[lkinca]

No, I was not using eMember to begin with. I’ve started using emember after 1 year of running business. So eMember and eStore are set up and properly handling cancellations.

But I am trying to set my OLD members up so if they cancel through PayPal, it will remove them from the eMember category. Obviously I had to manually set up customer records for my old users, which I have done. In other testing I learned through your debug logs that eStore uses the Subscriber ID (in my case it is in the format I-############) to find a subscription and cancel it. But I don’t see anywhere in the customer record to add that subscriber ID.

Is there a way to get PayPal to handle cancellations of eMember members or does that rely on information that you send at the time of subscription cancellation?

Thanks

[amin007]

I see. The IPN notification of subsequent recurring payment/cancellation for the existing subscriptions will go to the script that it setup when you subscribed them. It will not get sent to eMember.

You mainly have to worry about their cancellations as all the new payments will be handled via eMember and eStore.

To handle the cancellation is not that hard. You still have that IPN handling script in place right (the one that was handling the paypal’s notification before)? All you need to do is modify that script a bit so when it receives a cancellation notice for an existing subscription payment it just looks up the email address in eMember’s database and cancel that account. Since, you are not going to get cancellations every day you can even do it manually. You can modify that script to send you an email when it receives the cancellation and then you manually take care of that account. Over time the old subscriptions will die off.

[lkinca]

Ok, so we just need to handle it manually or set the script up to talk to eStore/eMember, correct?

[amin007]

That way you won’t have to modify anything in the plugin. Every PayPal IPN is not the same. eMember or eStore expects the IPN to be in a certain format. So it won’t process your old IPNs that you setup using some other script without modification to the plugin. You don’t want to make too many code modifications to the plugin otherwise upgrading with be a big hassle for you in the future.

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