If you’ve set up Stripe subscriptions on your Simple Membership site, you may be wondering how to cancel a subscription (either on behalf of a member or by allowing the member to cancel it themselves).
Whether a customer has contacted you requesting to terminate their membership, or you need to revoke access for a problematic user, this guide explains all the available methods for canceling a Stripe subscription—both as the site administrator and as the member.
Table of Contents
- Canceling a Stripe Subscription as the Merchant
- Display Member’s Active Subscription and Cancellation Link
- Creating a Stripe Subscription Cancellation Button for Members
- What Happens When a Subscription is Cancelled?
Canceling a Stripe Subscription as the Merchant
If a member has contacted you to cancel their membership subscription, follow the steps below to complete the cancellation:
Step 1) Ask the member for their email address (if they have not provided this to you).
Step 2) Open the Members menu under WP Membership in your WordPress dashboard.
Step 3) Paste the member’s Email Address into the search field and click search. This will bring up the details of the member in question.
Step 4) Click the Edit button for that member. This will take you to the Edit Member page. Locate the field titled Subscriber ID/Reference within the member’s profile.
Step 5) In this field, you’ll find the member’s Stripe Subscriber ID, which you can use to easily locate their subscription in your Stripe account.
Copy the ID from this field. If the value contains a | character, only copy the portion before the |.
Example: If your members subscribe ID is “sub_EMV1Wv1QAHf7sd|3756” only copy “sub_EMV1Wv1QAHf7sd“
(Alternatively you can copy the members Transaction ID from the Simple Membership Payments menu.)
Step 6) Log into the Stripe account that you are using for your Simple Membership installed site.
Step 7) Within the Stripe Account click on the Billing menu and then on Subscriptions.
Step 8) Paste the member’s Stripe Subscriber ID into the search bar at the top.
Step 9) Click the more options button for that subscriber and then click the Cancel subscription link.
Step 10) Follow the prompts to cancel the member’s subscription.
Step 11) If you have configured the stripe webhooks properly when creating the Stripe subscription button, then our plugin will receive this cancellation notification and it will deactivate the member’s account automatically.
Alternatively, you can go to your Simple Membership Members menu, manually make the account status for that member Inactive. Make sure you Save Changes.
Step 12) Let the member know that their subscription has been canceled and they will no longer have access to members-only content.
Display Member’s Active Subscription and Cancellation Link
If you want to allow your members to cancel their own subscriptions, this is the recommended method.
A new shortcode has been introduced that displays the logged-in member’s active subscription (if any) along with a cancel button. You can review the documentation for it here.
Creating a Stripe Subscription Cancellation Button for Members
If you want to offer a button that your members can click on your site to cancel an existing Stripe subscription, then use the following shortcode on a page:
[swpm_stripe_subscription_cancel_link]
Logged-in members can click on the button created by this shortcode to cancel a Stripe subscription.
What Happens When a Subscription is Cancelled?
Read the what happens when a subscription is cancelled documentation.