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Hi everyone,
At the moment whenever a member cancels their recurring PayPal payment their WP eMember profile become immediately inactive. Is there a way to stop this from happening so that their profiles only become inactive when their next payment doesn’t go through?
Thanks.Please read this explanation, to see if the explanation applies to you.
Hi, so I followed the advice in that thread and could’ve been a bit of a disaster. I changed one of my membership levels to 31 day expiry & it all looked fine initially, then after a while WP eMember changed all of the members’ statuses who are in that membership level to “Expired”!
Luckily there were only 30 or so members in that level so changing them back to active ASAP manually was not too time consuming.
Any ideas why this happened? I think others should be advised of this as if I had changed the membership level where I have over 1,000 members it would have been very stressful indeed!If you set the “Membership Duration” field to “no expiry or until cancelled” then it will expire the account when the subscription is cancelled (“until cancelled” means it will expire when the subscription is cancelled or expired). Note: this setting is independent of the subscription terms you setup for the payment button(s). They would still be set for 31 days.
Hi again. Not sure I understand. Here’s what I did step-by-step…
In my WordPress back-end I clicked on “WP eMember”, then “Membership Level”.
I then clicked “Edit” next to one of my membership levels.
In the area headed “Subscription Duration” the “No Expiry or Until Cancelled” option was selected, I changed this to “Expire After an Interval” and set it to 31 days.
Then, only after a while (i.e. not immediately) all of the members that were in that membership level had their “Account State” automatically changed from “Active” to “Expired” and therefore could no longer log in.
Based on the info in the thread you suggested to me, I was expecting the active members to remain active but for their accounts not to be put into “Inactive” status immediately after cancellation.
What did I do differently from what you are suggesting?If you change things in the middle, you also need to adjust the “Subscription Starts” field’s value of the member profiles. Otherwise if the Subscription Starts field’s value of a profile is 1st January, 2018 and your duration is 31 days, then that means that account has expired (based on the conditions you have now set). So you need to adjust all the correct parameters.
Read the following documentation:
OK, so a couple more questions…
If I have a member that joined in 2019 & I change the “Subscription Duration” of their membership level to “Expire After an Interval” and 31 days then I need to go into their member profile and change their “Subscription Starts” date to, say, today so that their membership status doesn’t drop into “Expired” status.
If they make their next payment does the “Subscription Starts” date get changed automatically to the date of that payment?
Also, I have over 1,100 members – is there a way to change their “Subscription Starts” dates easily?Yes, after you make the correction/change in the profile, their “Start date” will change automatically in the future when they make another new payment.
You can use the bulk update “start date” option as explained in the following documentation:
How to Bulk Update Member’s Start Date and Membership Level with WP eMember
Hi again, I really don’t believe that this will happen. I have, for example, a member who joined in Sept 2019 and has been making the monthly payments ever since and in her profile the “Subscription Starts” date is still set to 2019-09-15, i.e. it does not get updated every month with every new payment date as you have suggested.
This means that if I set her “Subscription Starts” date to today and then her Membership Level to “Expire After an Interval” and 31 days, after she makes her next payment next month her account will still drop into “Expired” status as her “Subscription Starts” date will still be sat at today’s date.
There is something else happening on your site that’s causing this behavior. Most likely the IPN messages aren’t being received by the plugin. I remember checking your site couple of weeks ago and there were some issues with the secondary levels not having start date set. So there was definitely some configuration issues on this site.
Have you received any new subscription/recurring payment recently from a user? If you have, how is that profile behaving?
Hi, I’ve received around 90 new members in February and haven’t heard of any significant issues from any of the new members. They don’t seem to be getting error messages when they click on the registration link any more, which did happen a lot previously.
Any further insight that you have into what could be wrong here would be really appreciated. At the moment I have to manually activate members’ profiles straight after they cancel, so that they can access the content for the rest of the month they have paid for. Sometimes I can’t do that straight away and therefore receive complaints as they are still expecting to be able to access everything, so would be great to get this fixed.I’ve received around 90 new members in February and haven’t heard of any significant issues from any of the new members. They don’t seem to be getting error messages when they click on the registration link any more, which did happen a lot previously.
Any further insight that you have into what could be wrong here would be really appreciated.Going forward; please keep a written log or “diary” of everything, including any settings, that you change on your site; and any consequential or observable affects that occur. In the IT business, we call this a “Change Control Log.”
At the moment I have to manually activate members’ profiles straight after they cancel, so that they can access the content for the rest of the month they have paid for. Sometimes I can’t do that straight away and therefore receive complaints as they are still expecting to be able to access everything, so would be great to get this fixed.
In the everyday physical world, usually one of two things happen, when you cancel a subscription or service.
- Your current access to services immediately gets cut off; and you may or may not be entitled to proration for what you have already paid. A newspaper or magazine subscription is a good example. Because websites are usually compared to newspapers and magazines; eMember uses the “immediate” cancellation model.
- Your current access to services lasts until the end of the current billing cycle; then gets cut off. The rent on a flat, or garbage collection, is a good example.
In either case, “in the everyday physical world,” what happens when service is cancelled, is legally governed by a set of Terms & Conditions (T&C) that a person agrees to, at the beginning of their service. Granted, it is usually mentioned in 8 point text at the bottom of your bills, or you have to look for an obscure link at the bottom of a webpage; but these T&C are legally binding. And in the absence of written T&C the courts usually side with the subscriber.
YOU NEED to decide what your T&C are going to be for membership cancellations, and then publish them on your site. There is an optional field on the membership registration page you can use, to inform and enforce agreement to your T&C, which would include your chosen cancellation policy. This will go a long way, towards setting membership cancellation expectations. Oh, and did I mention that it’s legally enforceable???
Hi, thanks for your speedy reply. Going forwards I will keep a log of all things that are updated or amended on my website.
My Ts&Cs have always been very clear from the start of creating a membership on my website – users will be able to access all of the content for the monthly billing cycle they have paid for. This has never changed and will not change. What I need from the WP eMember plugin is for this to be actioned automatically, instead of me having to manually activate every cancellation when the user is still within their billing cycle. That was why I raised this issue in the first place.
The initial solution that I was offered, i.e. to change the membership levels to 31 day expiry, did not work. It changed all the members’ profiles to “Expired” status.
The subsequent additional solution I was offered, i.e. changing the “Subscription Starts” date of all my members to a recent date, was not a viable one as this date does not get updated automatically when a member makes a monthly payment, so after 31 days everyone would end up in “Expired” status again.
What is interesting is the comment from one of your admins: “Most likely the IPN messages aren’t being received by the plugin” – I think that is worth exploring. So what I’d like is any possible solutions to that.
If we can get the “Subscription Starts” date for all members to update every time they make a payment, then the solution of changing the membership levels to 31 day expiry will work.What I need from the WP eMember plugin is for this to be actioned automatically, instead of me having to manually activate every cancellation when the user is still within their billing cycle.
It sounds like a custom work order; if that is something you want badly enough.
What is interesting is the comment from one of your admins: “Most likely the IPN messages aren’t being received by the plugin” – I think that is worth exploring. So what I’d like is any possible solutions to that.
Whenever a subscription payment is due; the plugin expects PayPal to send a “payment received” IPN message. If the payment is not received in time, the membership goes inactive. If you notice someone going inactive, it could be due to a deliberate cancellation, payment method failure, or “network connection mystery.” Your PayPal account has a “Manage Subscriptions” page. You should be able to view it, and determine if the inactive status was caused by a deliberate cancellation, failed payment method, or Internet problem.
@admin said: I remember checking your site couple of weeks ago and there were some issues with the secondary levels not having start date set.
Were those secondary levels referred to, set manually or by normal subscription payment?
Hi. What I am expecting to happen is for the “Subscription Starts” date to be updated by the plugin when an existing member makes a payment via PayPal. I believe this is to be a standard feature of WP eMember and not a customisation. One of the WP eMember admins previously mentioned this is this thread.
If this was working correctly for me then I would happily set all of my membership levels to 31-day expiry and the whole issue here would be solved, however it is not working.
I know that PayPal is talking to my WP eMember plugin successfully as new memberships are being created fine and member’s cancellations are coming through fine. However, it’s just the “Subscription Starts” date that is not being updated for every member every month when they make a payment.
That’s the thing that I need your help on. - Your current access to services immediately gets cut off; and you may or may not be entitled to proration for what you have already paid. A newspaper or magazine subscription is a good example. Because websites are usually compared to newspapers and magazines; eMember uses the “immediate” cancellation model.
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