Yearly Subscriptions – Txn Declined

Hello, just wondering if anyone else has run into this issue..

Currently setting up a site to use 2 different subscription options- either a monthly or yearly. I have monthly subscribers being set to level 1 and yearly set at level 2, although there really is no difference in the content that they will see.

My issue is with the yearly subscribers. I noticed an intermittent issue when attempting to subscribe, and finally looked into the logs where I found this error being returned from Authorize.Net:

Code: E00018
Response: Credit Card expires before the start of the subscription.

Even though authorize was declining the transaction, these yearly subscribers were still being created and can access the content. The expiration date I was using is 1/2014, but s2member is setting the x_start_date field to 4/12/2014 (meaning Authorize.Net is correct, the CC will be expired before the start date begins).

Why is this happening? Why would s2member set the start date of the subscription to 1 year out instead of the current date? Is this something I can change/configure, or am I stuck with users who may not be able to register because their CC will expire in less than 12 months?

Below is the shortcode I am using for the Yearly Signup form:

[s2Member-Pro-AuthNet-Form level=”2″ ccaps=”” desc=” ” cc=”USD” custom=”my.domain.com” ta=”0″ tp=”0″ tt=”D” ra=”480″ rp=”1″ rt=”Y” rr=”1″ rrt=”” accept=”visa,mastercard” coupon=”” accept_coupons=”0″ default_country_code=”US” captcha=”0″ /]

• This topic was modified 3 years, 8 months ago by  Eduan. Reason: Moved to the customers forum

Thank you for reporting this important issue.

We are aware of this behavior, and it’s something we’re hoping to look into in the next major release of s2Member. Currently there’s no way to keep this behavior from happening. I’d recommend putting up a Billing Update Form to help Users have a way to update their credit card information before the recurring payment comes up.

See: Dashboard -› s2Member® -› Authorize.Net® Pro Forms -› Billing Update Forms

Could you tell me the reasoning behind sending authorize an x_start_date that is one year out rather than the current date? Perhaps I’m misunderstanding the purpose behind that field.

I can’t really use the billing update form approach to solve this, as it is occuring during initial sign-up for the yearly subscribers. In order to successfully subscribe, users must enter an expiration date that is at least 1 day after today + 1 year. I imagine that the majority of the time this won’t be an issue (especially for monthly subscribers, since in their case the would need an expiration date of at least 1 day after today + 1 month), although there probably is a large percentage of people out there whose cards will expire within the coming year, so this is somewhat of an issue for me.

I can’t really use the billing update form approach to solve this, as it is occuring during initial sign-up for the yearly subscribers. In order to successfully subscribe, users must enter an expiration date that is at least 1 day after today + 1 year. I imagine that the majority of the time this won’t be an issue (especially for monthly subscribers, since in their case the would need an expiration date of at least 1 day after today + 1 month), although there probably is a large percentage of people out there whose cards will expire within the coming year, so this is somewhat of an issue for me.

I understand and I’ve sent our development team a reminder on this. If you absolutely need this I’d recommend getting a developer to help you set up a check in s2Member to help you with this. s2Member does check the values that are passed before sending them to PayPal with PayPal Pro Forms, so a developer could check to make sure that the expiration date is correct by hooking into these checks.