Trouble with PayPal annual re-subscriptions

Hi S2Member developers,

Your plugin has been great except for one issue that’s hit us 1 year after installing it. This issue has to do with annual subscriptions and people who try to re-subscribe after 12 months. We have monthly subscriptions that work fine, but the annual ones don’t seem to be renewing right.

It seems like in our system, a disconnect has emerged between what’s happening on Paypal and what’s happening on S2. While PayPal is renewing annual subscriptions, S2Members doesn’t seem to be getting the message that payment has been posted, so user accounts are expiring.

Do you know a good way to troubleshoot this? Any help much appreciated.

-John

Thanks for reporting this important issue.

Can you please post the PayPal Button Shortcode that you integrated with s2Member? In other words, for these Members who are expiring on the WP side of things, what exactly did they purchase from you? We’ll need to see how your Shortcode was configured please.

Also, it would be a good idea to enable s2Member’s logging routines, so you can see if PayPal is sending s2Member® IPNs behind-the-scene, which are resulting in these expirations (i.e. failed payments, cancellations, etc). What do your log files tell you? Feel free to post those privately for us to review with you.

See: Dashboard -› s2Member® -› PayPal® Options -› Account Details -› Logging
See: s2Member® » Private Contact Form

Hi guys: Thanks for the help. Here’s the shortcode. Maybe there’s something missing from it that would allow for it to respond better to these PayPal subscriptions?

[s2Member-PayPal-Button level="4" ccaps="" desc="Annual: $50/year / The even more generous plan." ps="paypal" lc="" cc="USD" dg="0" ns="1" custom="www.peterbcollins.com" ta="0" tp="0" tt="D" ra="50" rp="1" rt="Y" rr="1" rrt="" rra="1" image="default" output="button" /]

What people are ordering is an annual subscription to a radio show podcast. We also have a month-to-month subscription. The monthly one seems to renew just fine. Both plans give you access through a WordPress user account who is assigned a different role based on which plan he or she has subscribed to.

Here, for comparison, is the monthly shortcode.

[s2Member-PayPal-Button level="1" ccaps="" desc="$5/Month Member / The basic plan." ps="paypal" lc="" cc="USD" dg="0" ns="1" custom="www.peterbcollins.com" ta="0" tp="0" tt="D" ra="5" rp="1" rt="M" rr="1" rrt="" rra="1" image="default" output="button" /]

Any help much appreciated!

-John

Thanks for the follow-up :-)

It seems like in our system, a disconnect has emerged between what’s happening on Paypal and what’s happening on S2. While PayPal is renewing annual subscriptions, S2Members doesn’t seem to be getting the message that payment has been posted, so user accounts are expiring.

Your shortcodes look good.

When you say “user accounts are expiring”, what do you mean exactly by this? Are they losing access on-site? If so, what are they losing access to? Is their Role being demoted back down to a Free Subscriber? If that’s the case, is s2Member leaving you an Administrative Note on the account, regarding the demotion?

Please note… given the Shortcodes that you posted, s2Member would not set an EOT Time for these customers, because s2Member expects to be notified by PayPal if there is a problem. If there are no problems reported by PayPal, s2Member assumes that everything on the billing side is fine, and access should continue.

So my assumption (based on what I know thus far), is that PayPal is reporting to s2Member, that there is a problem somewhere with your customer accounts. Inspecting your PayPal IPN logs that are maintained by s2Member would reveal any communication like this that’s occurred.