subscriber modification help

Hello,
So I find myself in a familiar situation…4 Paypal payments skipped in the group of payments that came through today. More than an hour of research here in the forum later, my brain is a muddle and I am no further along resolving the issues. I recently upgraded to Pro here, in the hopes of receiving more help. I am hoping to get some in regards to some key issues.

-As a way to avoid some of these skipped payment issues and because I am going to raise my monthly recurring charge, I want to offer my members an annual payment at current rates.

-I have done this for three members, one by one, over the past few months as their skipped payments issue couldn’t be resolved after many hours of wrangling with Paypal. Two of these members’ modification process seemed to go through well and are associated with their old profiles (this is important as we want their comments and profiles over the years to stay constant)

-I followed the same process for each, tho’ am now wondering if I forgot to cancel the last member’s Paypal profile before having her use the modification button and that is why her monthly payments are still being put through by Paypal. Is it safe to just cancel that now and assume the annual payment will still be associated?

-Last and main thought…how can I easily offer the subscriber modification button to the membership at large when I make the announcement about the new option? For these few members, I had them go to a password-protected page after they were logged in. I suppose it could be public now, tho’, and the button just handles each member as they arrive on the page and click the button?

I will say in advance that I don’t have a mind for shortcodes and php and such and will need this to be as simple as possible, tho’ I am hoping that here in the Customer forum, I can expect more help from those of you who are skilled in this area?

With thanks,

Lesley

Ok, so am I to understand that my question didn’t conform to the Support Policy?

I feel in the same situation that I did before I became a paid customer, which is not how you would want me to feel, I would hope.

Please let me know how I can clarify or if this question is out of the realm of support.

Thank you for reporting this important issue. We are very sorry for the delay.

I am beginning an investigation on PayPal skipped payment as of now, as this seems to be a problem with more than 1 member of the s2Member community. I will keep you notified if we find anything out as to what might be causing this problem.

In the meantime, I would recommend cancelling any subscriptions that are causing skipped payments. s2Member should automatically demote users when this happens (depending on the time that you cancel the subscription, you may notice that s2Member gives the user some extra time, as they may have already paid for time, this is to be expected).

You may want to have a section within your Login Welcome Page which has a Pro Form to upgrade back up to full membership after you cancel their subscription (perhaps protected by a Custom Capability which you can assign to Users when you cancel their subscription), and have Users use this form to upgrade.

See: Dashboard -› s2Member® -› API / Scripting -› Custom Capabilities

-I followed the same process for each, tho’ am now wondering if I forgot to cancel the last member’s Paypal profile before having her use the modification button and that is why her monthly payments are still being put through by Paypal. Is it safe to just cancel that now and assume the annual payment will still be associated?

This is safe, as your Users should now be using a different PayPal subscription ID for s2Member to track. s2Member only tracks one Subscription at a time for access, so cancelling the old subscription will simply be ignored by s2Member.

-Last and main thought…how can I easily offer the subscriber modification button to the membership at large when I make the announcement about the new option? For these few members, I had them go to a password-protected page after they were logged in. I suppose it could be public now, tho’, and the button just handles each member as they arrive on the page and click the button?

I’m unsure what you mean here. Are you wishing to allow Users to upgrade when you release a new part of your site? If that’s the case, you should be able to just replace the Pro Forms in your Membership Options Page, as well as have a Billing Modification Form available on your Membership Options Page for users that are logged in, right?

You can decide what form to display using s2Member Shortcode Conditonals. See:
Dashboard -› s2Member® -› API / Scripting -› Simple/Shortcode Conditionals

I am beginning an investigation on PayPal skipped payment as of now, as this seems to be a problem with more than 1 member of the s2Member community. I will keep you notified if we find anything out as to what might be causing this problem.

Thank you for that…it is becoming such a problem for me and Paypal insists that is isn’t their problem and my very patient customers tell me that everything is good on their end. It seems to be something to do with the recurring payments as my customer’s other non-recurring payments go through fine as do modified one-time payments I have made for some of them.

This is safe, as your Users should now be using a different PayPal subscription ID for s2Member to track. s2Member only tracks one Subscription at a time for access, so cancelling the old subscription will simply be ignored by s2Member.

Well…I canceled the previous recurring payment, but it gave an automatic EOT, which I would think it shouldn’t have if it had connected the modified annual payment to her profile. But I changed the EOT to reflect the annual payment and hope that will be enough since it said in the guide that s2member “will obey” what I put in there?

I’m unsure what you mean here. Are you wishing to allow Users to upgrade when you release a new part of your site? If that’s the case, you should be able to just replace the Pro Forms in your Membership Options Page, as well as have a Billing Modification Form available on your Membership Options Page for users that are logged in, right?

Not really. Because of the Paypal messes and because I will soon be raising the price, I want to easily offer only my current members a new annual payment. I plan to announce it this week. So I wonder where to send them to find the subscriber modification button to allow the change. I wouldn’t want it on the public membership page.

And with what I described in the first section, I am wondering how to make it work smoothly without having to cancel profiles and resubscribe them, which is the only way I have figured out so far for a few. It would be much to much trouble for the many I expect to take me up on this.

Thanks so much for your help so far!

It’s been more than 48 hours that I’ve been waiting for an answer to my last reply. Hoping for some help very soon.

Well…I canceled the previous recurring payment, but it gave an automatic EOT, which I would think it shouldn’t have if it had connected the modified annual payment to her profile. But I changed the EOT to reflect the annual payment and hope that will be enough since it said in the guide that s2member “will obey” what I put in there?

This is intended behavior, assuming that you still have the account’s Paid Subscription ID filled in with the Transaction ID from the original subscription. You should first remove this from your User so s2Member will not be able to link the User with the transaction. Once this is done, s2Member can simply ignore the cancellation.

Not really. Because of the Paypal messes and because I will soon be raising the price, I want to easily offer only my current members a new annual payment. I plan to announce it this week. So I wonder where to send them to find the subscriber modification button to allow the change. I wouldn’t want it on the public membership page.

If that’s the case, I would recommend a little creativity here. Try creating your Pro Form with the new price with a Custom Capability as well, such as “price_1”. Then you can use Shortcode Conditionals on the page where you have your Modification form, and change the price based on whether they have this new Custom Capability or not. Users without the Custom Capability would be your older subscribers, and therefore would get the lower price.

See: Dashboard -› s2Member® -› API / Scripting -› Simple/Shortcode Conditionals

I’m sorry, but you’ve lost me with the short codes and custom capabilities. I am going to start a new thread with some very specific questions gleaned from this conversation and all of my searching in the forums.