Demotion based on next expected payment

The way s2M currently addresses membership cancellation seems a little odd. I wonder if there is a way around.

Here is the situation: i have a membership that is paid monthly by the member. Let`s say the member is paying more or less on the first of the month. The member pays on April 1st, as expected, but a few days later, decides to cancel the recurring payment. Currently, the system will demote the member and cut off the access immediately upon cancelling, even though the member has paid for the month, and should be able to keep her access until the next scheduled payment, right?

Is there a way to get that behavior? Is it something that can be integrated in a future version? I find it is logical for the member to keep their access until the next payment.

No, the EOT would be immediate for refunds or reversals.

A cancellation would not trigger an immediate EOT, the time for it would be set at the end of the paid term plus a day.

You can see the documentation and settings for it here: [hilite path]Dashboard -› s2Member® -› PayPal® Options -› Automatic EOT Behavior[/hilite]

Then, i guess s2M didn’t work as intended as the member lost the access to the course immediately upon cancelling the payment. From what i can read now, it should s2Member ” process an EOT until the User has completely used up the time they paid for.”

Any idea what could have caused this unexpected behavior?

Maybe the payment failed too many times? Not sure what else could have happened.

Did you check your logs for entries related to the subscription to see what it says about how it ended? [hilite path]Dashboard -› s2Member® -› Log Files (Debug) -› s2Member® Log Viewer[/hilite]

Did you just have it with this user or is it the way it’s behaving with everyone that cancels?

It only happened with this member (although i didn`t have cancellations in a long time). I also had one instance where Paypal confirmed that *I* cancelled a subscription, which i never did. I tried getting answer from Paypal, but after sending a request to the tech, i didn`t hear from them yet. No idea if it could be related or not.

As for the log, i have no clue what i would be looking for or where. Any hint to help?

I see, so it was just this case. So we don’t know if it’s a recurring problem yet.

As for the log, i have no clue what i would be looking for or where. Any hint to help?

You can look for the subscr ID in the logs.

I am really not sure what I am looking for. I checked all 3 logs and nothing with the member’s name comes up in April, which is when the month the cancellation happened. Paypal cannot seem to find anything either.

Any idea what I should see or not see?

BTW, this is what I got from Paypal:

I have reviewed the account and it appears that the customer made a payment to you a few seconds before the subscription was cancelled. The subscription was cancelled due to an API from your application that instructed us to cancel the subscription.

There is no way to know why we were told to cancel the subscription, you would have to look back in your logs on your webserver to see why that action was taken by the application.

Do you have a cancellation button/form that the user may have used? s2Member would not originate a cancellation on its own.

He says an API from s2Member, is there something in the PayPal API log about it?

When i checked, i found absolutely no entry on the date of that cancellation, on any log (i checked them all).
The member made a “pay now” purchase seconds before the cancellation of the recurring membership. They are not the same amount and unrelated to each other so i would not see how or why one would trigger the cancellation.

As for a cancellation button, i can’t remember having one. I have one button for membership upgrade but that button is on a page where i send only members after a certain time, through an individual email (nothing automatic, or auto-responder) and it would be to increase the membership fee and does not have the option to cancel (as far as i know anyways).

This is really puzzling me. The last email i got from Paypal says this:
“The message you received was just a notification that the ticket was still pending, I was not waiting for any more information. But to answer your question of what more you need to provide, there is not much you would need to provide us. At this point you would want to go to your cart provider, s2Member and work with them to find out why their software made a call to us to cancel the subscription.”

I am really in the fog now.

So the user had a subscription with you and then made a buy-now purchase, which caused the subscription’s cancellation?

I’ll ask Jason about this, too.

Yes, that is what happened, apparently. However, several other members have a subscription and did make individual purchases and nothing like that ever happened. Also, this member did not make the single purchase on the day of her renewal as her renewal date is around the 16th of the month and this incident happened on the 9th of the month (I thought that maybe Paypal could have gotten confused if both transactions really would have happened within seconds of each other, but that is not the case).

I see, then there doesn’t seem to be a relationship between the two things… I really don’t know what may have caused it. If you see it happen again and have logging enabled, please let me know so we can see the logs. And the best would be if you manage to reproduce the behaviour and tell me the steps to do it myself.

When I asked Jason about buy-nows cancelling subscriptions, he replied this:

Any sale results in a new Paid Subscr. ID (and the old one is cancelled).
With TWO exceptions. If [hilite mono]level="*"[/hilite] where the customer is making a Buy Now purchase for Independent Custom Capabilities; or if you are selling Specific Post/Page Access via Buy Now functionality.

If you are making a Buy Now purchase that does NOT have [hilite mono]level="*"[/hilite] it will cancel the previous Subscription and start you on a new one that is costing you only ONE time (e.g. a Buy Now purchase).

If you want to sell something extra, WITHOUT modifying an existing Subscription (of any kind); you should do that with Independent Custom Capabilities (e.g. [hilite mono]level="*"[/hilite]), or with Specific Post/Page Access.

The above details are targeted to site owners using Pro Forms, PayPal Standard Buttons do NOT behave this way. The customer (or the site owner) must cancel the previous Subscription (if there was one). However, it is possible to create a Subscription Modification Button where the customer can update their existing Subscription by switching to a new one. Anyay, PayPal Standard Buttons are a different game all together when it comes to modifications.

Ah!!! Thanks for the explanation. That is likely what happened. I must have used the Level1 from form thinking that everyone is on level 1 anyways, without realizing the implication of using THAT particular form.

It might be useful to add a warning in those sections. Although it is well spelled out in the Buy Now section, one might not check that section for info.

Got it. Thanks for the feedback! I’ll show it to Jason. :)