Automatic Renewal Notifications?

We have a membership site with an annual billing cycle. Since so much time elapses between renewals, we don’t want to surprise our members with a Paypal transaction “out of the blue.”

Is it possible for s2Member to send an automatic renewal reminder/notifications — before they’re charged — to members who are on Paypal Payment Standard Subscriptions?

Ideally, we’d like to have the system send them a reminder email a week or two before it’s going to be auto-charged. That way they won’t be surprised by the charge, or they can cancel before the charge happens.

Thanks!

Hello Andrew,

This isn’t currently possible with s2Member, as-is. However, Bruce (support rep) has developed a hack to achieve this. You can find it in the hacks section of the community forums: http://www.s2member.com/forums/forum/community/extensions-hacks/

Hope this helps. :)

Hi Eduan,

Yes, I saw Bruce’s hack, and would be fine implementing that. Except, it seems to require an EOT to be set in s2Member — and I’ve also read in the support forums that with Paypal subscriptions, no EOT will be set for the user. (Since as far as s2Member is concerned, their account has no expiration date, as long as the Paypal subscription stays active and auto-renews.)

So how do we send out notifications before the Paypal subscription auto-renews? (I tried to find this functionality in Paypal — thinking maybe the notification could come from them instead of s2Member — but so far no luck there, either).

Thanks,
Andrew

Hi Andrew,

You can find info on pulling this info from PayPal in this post:

http://www.s2member.com/forums/topic/last-payment-time-is-wrong-2/#post-33327

I will be updating that article in the near future to work with recurring subscriptions.

Thanks Bruce – that’s helpful. So if I read that right, once I pull the info from paypal, I’d need to also set up something to send out an email notification…none of that would be built in to S2Member… right?

Is anything like this on the roadmap for the next version of s2Member? Since we’re a yearly subscription, we really won’t need these reminder emails until at least next October… so if you’re going to be integrating notifications in the next release, maybe I can just hold off on any of this?

Thanks,
Andrew

Hi Andrew,

I don’t have an official list for what’s going to be in the next major release of s2Member, but there’s a good chance the functionality to complete what you need will be available. We’re hoping to have this released early to mid 2013.

Hi Bruce,

If you are considering renewal notices in the upcoming release, might you (if possible with Paypal) also include functionality to halt auto-renewing subscriptions?

Rick,

I’ll talk to our dev team about it. Generally users wouldn’t want to halt subscriptions, and I’m not sure if this is possible with PayPal.