PayPal Pro Recurring Billing Issues

Okay…so I’m going to do my best to describe the issue we’re experiencing and hope that someone at S2Member can point me towards a solution.

Our site “Photographer’s Breakthrough” (photographersbreakthrough.com) charges an annual/yearly membership fee for access to their online photography critiques and other members-only content. There is only one paid membership level (s2Member Level 1) for the entire site. We launched this service in mid April, 2012 and now (1-year later) some of the initial membership signups are not renewing correctly.

We’ve narrowed it down to the following issues/questions:

1. Some members continue to be able to log in even though their 12-month subscription has expired and the Billing Re-attempts have failed the correct number of times. These members still show “Paid Subscriber ID”s in the WP Admin, are still able to log in and are still show as “Active” within the PayPal Recurring Payments list. From everything I’ve read, I’m lead to believe that if a subscription has not renewed after 2 failures (see my shortcode settings below) then that user’s access will be revoked based on the interaction between s2 & PayPal. I have 31 users that PayPal is showing as having “Outstanding Payments” (with 2 payment failures on each one) and all of these users are still active within s2. specific examples of this situation and can share them (privately) if it would help.

[s2Member-Pro-PayPal-Form level="1" ccaps="" desc="$40.00 USD / Yearly ( recurring charge, for ongoing access )" ps="paypal" lc="" cc="USD" dg="0" ns="1" custom="www.photographersbreakthrough.com" ta="0" tp="0" tt="D" ra="40.00" rp="1" rt="Y" rr="1" rrt="" rra="2" accept="paypal,visa,mastercard,amex,discover,maestro,solo" accept_via_paypal="paypal" coupon="" accept_coupons="0" default_country_code="" captcha="0" /]

2. In other cases, some memberships have been manually cancelled (according to PayPal) and yet those users all appear to be able to still log in as well.

3. Lastly I’m told that of the 31 members that are currently listed as having “Outstanding Payments” (within PayPal), there are a number of them who have indicated that they would like to renew but didn’t know that their membership term was up or that their renewal requests were silently failing in the background. These users report that they never received any email notifications that their membership renewal was failing at PayPal.

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Any help would be greatly appreciated from someone who has seen anything similar to this before.

Also…from within PayPal, it seems as though we could be manually “Suspending” some of these non-paying users and maybe that would trigger the EOT within s2….I guess I just thought that this would all be taken care of automatically.

Thanks in advance.

Thank you for reporting this important issue.

I’m not seeing any mention of log files here. Do you have logging enabled? See: Dashboard -› s2Member® -› Log Files (Debug) -› Logging Configuration

If so, can you send us a Dashboard login so we can take a look at them?

Thanks for the response Bruce….I’d be happy to share a Dashboard login with someone there at s2. What’s the best way to get that information to you? Also…re: logging, I’d be happy to enable this, so long as I’m not creating a security concern while that data is being logged.

Can you please let me know the best way to proceed?

Thx!

Logging is enabled from here: [hilite path]Dashboard -› s2Member® -› Log Files (Debug) -› Logging Configuration[/hilite]

You can hack your installation to set a custom location for your s2Member log files:

Please create this dir/file: /wp-content/mu-plugins/s2-hacks.php
Knowledge Base » Hacking s2Member® Via Hooks/Filters

[hilite pre_code]
s2Member® » Private Contact Form. Please leave a reply here letting us know once you sent it. Thanks!

Thank you for the info…I’ve added the function, created an off-HTTP space logging directory and used your contact form to send over access account info. Looking forward to any clues that will help us figure out why cancelled and/or non-paying members (from failed renewals) are not automatically being demoted by s2member.

Thanks in advance.

Thanks Tony. Got the email. I just tried to login to the dashboard, but it’s not letting me. Could you verify that the login info is correct? Thanks!

About the logs, we’ll have to wait until you have the problem again so something gets logged.

You can do tests with a test user account, and give it an EOT in the past so the automatic behavior happens soon, so we confirm that the EOT behavior is working. [hilite path]Dashboard -› s2Member® -› PayPal® Options -› Automatic EOT Behavior[/hilite]

Before I was just answering your last reply, asking how to send the info, now I went and read the rest of the thread and have a few comments:

I have 31 users that PayPal is showing as having “Outstanding Payments” (with 2 payment failures on each one) and all of these users are still active within s2.

But are the subscriptions still active in PayPal? s2Member would set the EOT for those users when the subscription ends, and it’s PayPal who tells s2Member that.

2. In other cases, some memberships have been manually cancelled (according to PayPal) and yet those users all appear to be able to still log in as well.

If the subscription was cancelled, then s2Member should have been notified, and the EOT time set. With logging enabled, there would be an entry for these cancellations.

These users report that they never received any email notifications that their membership renewal was failing at PayPal.

I don’t know if PayPal has a setting to notify the customers about their failed payments. Have you asked PayPal support?

Embarrassingly, I realized that I did not actually click the “Submit” button and create the user late last night….I found that window still open in my browser today. My apologies. The user info I sent over yesterday should work correctly now.

Thank you for the other comments re: my questions. I’ll make a call to PayPal and look over the recurring payments dashboard with them….and ask these same questions.

Can I assume that you’ll try to log into the site now (assuming the newly created account works for you) and double check that we’re set to receive the logs…once the issue happens again?

Thank you for your assistance.

No problem, Tony.

Okay, it looks like you’re ready to do your tests and have them logged.

By the way, I noticed your s2Member admin menu to be all weird. You may want to try these tips to find what’s causing it, in case it’s causing other problems that aren’t as obvious: Knowledge Base » Common Troubleshooting Tips

Thank you for looking into this for me.

I’m curious what you mean by “admin to be all weird”. Could you send a screenshot or more of an explanation? It seems to appear fine on my end. Thanks!

This is what your s2Member menu looks like (left) and what it should look like (right):

Strange….I think the display order issue was the result of some customizations I’d done with a plugin called “Admin Menu”. I deleted, reinstalled and the menu order for our installation of s2 now matches your screenshot…but without some of the horizontal line separators. Not sure why that would be the case….but all menu items line up, so I think I’ll let that slide, unless you see any reason to be concerned.

No, if you know what you did there, it’s fine. I just mentioned it in case it was something else that could also be causing a problem in another -more important- area.