How much can we pay s2Member to solve our mem

Hello,

We use s2Member Pro, PayPal Pro, PayPal Merchant, PayPal PayFlow IPN, WordPress 3.5, Amazon S3 (for media) and iTunes (for delivery).

Last year we tried a few attempts at resolving these issues as they appeared, and as we stole time in the regular course of our real work–to try and diagnose random s2Member failures, like we’re beta testers.

s2Member works as advertised 90% of the time (or more). It’s the 10% +/- that’s the killer, distracting, time sucking vacuum that long ago failed us to keep the goodwill of the 10% of the members who continue to be charged months after they’ve cancelled.

As we understood it:

A. when a member cancels on the site, or stops paying, or we enter an EOT date

B. s2Member would

1. stop their payments after the next scheduled payment date, so they would never be charged again, and

2. after the end of the current month’s paid for period, s2Member would demote the user–reduce their member level using the default setting (which we have set to demote to non-paying, registered, subscriber), and then ,

3. they would not be charged again, and

4. they would no longer have access to member content, nor access to the member’s only, secured Amazon S2 content delivered to iTunes, and

5. the user would never be charged again, again…

This is not what is happening.

We randomly have members who:

A. cancel and continue to be charged months later

B. who we manually EOT and they continue to be charged and/or have member access

C. who stopped paying but are still listed as s2m level 1 or level 2

D. who can access member only content on the site AND on iTunes.

E. who are listed as Subscribers but continue to be charged

90% plus of the other members have a normal experience.

We’ve gone through s2Member settings more than once, and we “feel” that everything is correct–because it works MOST of the time.

We’re tired of Goolging, guessing, s2Member forumming…

Can we pay somebody at s2Member to support s2member? …to look at our logs, to look at our settings, to look at our PayPal info… and fix the problem so that we never have these issues, phone calls, emails and loss of good will with our members again?

We know it’s our mistake. We understand we do not have the right setting somewhere for something.

Perhaps I’m too much of a Utopian, romantic idealist–but I’d like s2Member to do what it’s supposed to do so we can use our time to do what we’re supposed to do.

We’ll pay for that privileged now–which we thought came with the purchase of s2Member originally.

Thank you.

Chris
s2Member Pro Field Beta Tester

P.s. if you think it’s exhausting reading this email and trying to decide how to respond and how to support this request–you should see how exhausting it is for us dealing with our members (trying to keep them happy, trying to seem like we’re professional) and for me doing the same with my director!!!

• This topic was modified 4 years ago by  AnotherOpus.
• This topic was modified 4 years ago by  AnotherOpus.

I can understand it can be confusing and exhausting to have these seemingly random problems, and what they imply. I’ll go over the symptoms you mentioned.

B. who we manually EOT and they continue to be charged and/or have member access

When you set an EOT manually, that doesn’t automatically end a subscription. It just tell s2Member to end access at that time, but the subscription is handled by the payment gateway, which doesn’t know about that. The subscription has to be ended in the gateway either by the user or you for it to stop. It’s possible that a few of the problems you mentioned, come from this assumption/mistake.

A. cancel and continue to be charged months later

When you say the user cancelled and continues to be charged, how did he cancel? Did he do it in the payment gateway? Or, if you have PayPal Pro or Authorize.Net, did he use the cancellation pro-form? Or did he call you to cancel it and you entered the EOT manually?

C. who stopped paying but are still listed as s2m level 1 or level 2

If the payment gateway stops receiving payments, then it’d notify s2Member and s2Member would set an EOT time, to trigger the auto-EOT behavior, which in your case is demote, if I’m not mistaken.

If the EOT never got set although the user stopped paying, then there would have been a communication error from the payment gateway and s2Member never found out.

The logs would help see better what happened with those particular subscriptions. [hilite path]Dashboard -› s2Member® -› PayPal® Options -› Account Details -› Logging[/hilite]

D. who can access member only content on the site AND on iTunes.

This goes together with the previous one, since not being demoted, the user would still have the access. Only those that have the required or higher level would have access to the restricted content, s2Member would not allow access to content restricted at a level higher than the user’s.

E. who are listed as Subscribers but continue to be charged

This would be possible for those for whom you set the EOT manually, but didn’t end the subscription in the payment gateway.