Restarting a Cancelled subscription by Paypal

This week, i had a member whose recuring payment didnt’ seem to go through with Paypal. I got notifications twice that the payment didn’t go through. Today, i get a notice that the payments are now cancelled. Shortly after, the member also emailed me about it. She didn’t cancel it and wants to continue with the subscription.

1- I told her to check with Paypal why the payments could not be processed. Any idea what it might be? Anything i can do to find out on my end in case it happens again and the member does not contact me?
2- if she wants to restart the subscription, what would be a way to do so? If she re-subscribe, she will be stuck with the large payment for the first “period” and then the monthly payment. Beside creating a special button for her ONLY, can you think of something else? Do you know if it can be reactivated without going through a re-subscription?

restarting cancelled subscription is a real PITA.

In all cases I had so far, the clients Credit Card didn’t work anymore. So tell you’re client to check that. Once that’s fixed, you need to go to the subscription profile, increase the max fail count, and then click on resume, and click on collect outstanding payments (you cannot collect that, before you have increased that counter for failed payments).

I never manage it in less than 10minutes per profile, luckily I only had a handful of profiles to reactivate. I think the first time it took me several hours….

Reactivating a subscription largely depends on PayPal and some types of cancelled subscriptions cannot be reactivated. You might have some clues in the s2Member logs as to why the payment failed, but you (or the customer) will likely need to contact PayPal to determine that.

If cancellations from failed payments is a common occurrence, you can change the maximum number of failed payments to something higher than the default (2 max failed payments before subscription is canceled) using the rra=”” shortcode attribute. On my personal site, I usually set it to 5 to give the user more time to do something about it (PayPal sends an email to the customer telling them their payment failed with a description of why).