Payment settings/frequency when migrating

Hi Raam great article you provided at http://www.s2member.com/kb/how-to-migrate-to-s2member-pro-from-other-software/

Let me ask you this, you mentioned “If the exported data from the other software contains expiration dates for each account…” my question is: what about if it does not?

Do I actually need it? Basically in general terms at the moment people subscribes the membership program tells paypal that starting that date they’ll charge X amount in Y frequency so it is paypal the responsible for the recurrent payment so why will I actually need this info for?

Can’t I just import them with no ‘expiration date’ ? At the end, paypal doesn’t know I changed the software controlling access to my content and they’ll just keep charging whenever the time is right, right?

In a broader scenario: What are the alternatives here?

Let me get you this scenario, let’s say that my only membership level is for monthly basis. I guess I could just set up any date to be the expiration date and us the same for everyone on the site (let’s say everyone expires on the 30th of each month) and probably somehow just setup an initial grace period like ie: 1 month free for everyone.

How will that work on regards to whatever date paypal say they expire? Not sure if it’ll be save just to do it without grace period and when (or if) someone contact complaining they couldn’t get in just manually change the date for those (hopefully few) affected?

Hi Ricarod,

For recurring subscriptions that do not have an expiration date, you should leave the expiration date field empty. The expiration date is only applicable when importing subscriptions that actually have an end date (e.g., a membership that was sold for 1 year of access). Recurring (e.g., monthly) subscriptions effectively do not have an end date — their end date is whenever the user decides to cancel their subscription.

If you have s2Member configured with IPN integration (Dashboard -› s2Member® -› PayPal® Options -› PayPal® IPN Integration) and PDT integration (Dashboard -› s2Member® -› PayPal® Options -› PayPal® PDT Integration), s2Member will receive an IPN message from PayPal when the user decides to cancel their subscription (or if their payment fails several times and PayPal automatically cancels their subscription).

When s2Member receives that cancellation IPN message, it will automatically set the EOT date and process the expiration according to your settings in Dashboard -› s2Member® -› PayPal® Options -› Automatic EOT Behavior.

The important thing to note is that your imported users must contain the PayPal Subscription ID that matches their PayPal subscription and their accounts must be set to use the PayPal gateway (both settings can be set in the import file). When s2Member receives a cancellation IPN message, it looks for the user account with the matching Subscription ID and then sets the EOT date on that account.