Simple cancellation button not working

I’ve installed the simple cancelation button on my membership site and I’m using PayPal for payment processing. Lately, I’ve had a few members telling me that they, “cancelled last month, right after their last payment went through,” yet they got charged again through PayPal and still have access. As if their account was not actually cancelled. I’ve issued refunds and also cancelled their recurring payments through PayPal on my end, yet still see that their accounts are still active even 2 months out on s2member.

What is going on here?

Please help!

Did any of these folks use PayPal (or did they all pay you with a credit card)? If they used PayPal, the s2Member® cancellation form will ask them to log into their PayPal account and terminate billing; because that’s required with PayPal customers. Anyway, just wondering if this might be part of the issue?

They ALL paid me through PayPal and I believe most with a credit card. At the time all of them signed up, I had not signed up for the PayPal “upgraded” service (sorry, I can’t remember the name, but it’s an additional $19/month) allowing my customers to NOT have to have a PayPal account and just be able to process their payment via credit card through PayPals portal.

So, in essence, every one of my customers (until recently) “had a PayPal account.”

Ah, I see. You’re talking about the infamous ERP service from PayPal. That’s been somewhat discouraged by s2Member because it lacks any API connectivity whatsoever. When your customer goes through PayPal, they pay through their PayPal account, and that’s normally where they would have access to cancel future payments. However, when you operate a PayPal account with their ERP service (which is one level shy of PayPal Pro) it still pushes the customer through PayPal, but because they don’t actually pay you with a PayPal account, it creates a scenario where the only way a customer can cancel is by contacting you.

s2Member is unable (due to PayPal API limitations) to cancel these accounts, and the customer is also unable to cancel billing, because they have no PayPal account connected to their recurring payments. Interally, it’s the difference on the PayPal side between what they term a “Subscription” vs. a “Recurring Profile”. A Recurring Profile is created under API integration (normally via PayPal Pro) while a Subscription is normally associated with PayPal Standard and/or the ERP service. Subscriptions can only be cancelled by a customer; or by the site owner. It’s not possible to cancel these through API calls alone; and thus, the Pro Cancellation Form will fail with an error back to the customer.

The solution in this unfortunate situation is to cancel these accounts manually. I would suggest posting a notice on the site that “if you experience an error during your cancellation attempt, please contact support for assistance” and this way you can deal with these on a case-by-case basis until you weed through these old customers that joined up under the ERP service.

In the future, you might consider going to PayPal Pro where this is not an issue at all, and the s2Member Pro cancellation form will behave just as expected, because the PayPal Pro APIs make this possible. See: http://www.primothemes.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=418#p7444

CRAP!! Thanks for your detailed answer, I really appreciate it and clearly understand. The reason I switched to this service, was because many of my customers were having MUCH difficulty becoming members due to PayPal’s process to verify their account (requiring them to check their bank account for micro deposits, etc). This was such a pain in the @@S that I heard clients just gave up — not a good thing when I’m trying to make it as easy as possible to sign up. Paypal suggested this as a solution and it’s been working great until this new problem.

What would be a solution to this, that would not regress back the former issue of being difficult, and yet still be friendly with S2M? Do I need PayPal pro?

Very welcome :-) Yea, I would go with PayPal Pro if I were you. It’s worth every dime. You’ll get more sales overall with that service because everything works better, and you expand your customer’s options during checkout. You’d be amazed how much better a customer will respond to paying you on-site via Pro Forms as opposed to going throug another service and then being returned to your site afterwards.

~ Good luck :-) Sorry to hear you had this trouble.

Thanks for your advice and time, Mike — I greatly appreciate it.