Calendar year recurring payment

[dfuller52]

I have read over the documentation but I am confused. We have an annual membership for a physical product (membership/magazine subscription) that expires on Dec. 31 each year. I saw a table on the page about Duration that indicated choosing the fixed date option for recurring subscriptions is not ideal. Why is that?

Our challenge is that getting people to renew takes a lot of volunteer hours, contacting them and waiting for them to get around to it – even though the fully intend to renew.

I did read over the documentation, but this specific scenario didn’t seem to be described. I understood the relevant paragraphs to imply members must log in to renew. We want this to happen automatically until they cancel.

[The Assurer]

Is this what you are trying to do?
https://simple-membership-plugin.com/forums/topic/fixed-date-expiration-and-payments/

[dfuller52]

I’m not sure. I read the old thread and I am not clear on the need to create a new membership with a different date, one year further on. Is that how we achieve automatic renewal, or do they have to log in and renew? We want it to renew automatically.

[admin]

Hi, The standard recurring payment API of PayPal or Stripe that we use in our plugin doesn’t offer the kind of recurring payment option you are looking for. So we don’t have an option for it.

For an automatic recurring payment system based on the calendar year, the payment plugin should perform the following actions when a visitor interacts with the subscription or recurring payment button:

1. Prorated Calculation – Automatically determine the remaining days in the current year and calculate the appropriate charge for that period.
2. Initial Payment Processing – Charge the calculated prorated amount for the remaining days.
3. Future Recurring Schedule – Set the next recurring payment date to align with the start of the following calendar year, ensuring seamless annual renewals.

[dfuller52]

I found a solution on the PayPal for Business site. It allowed me to create variations for the three price levels and generated a script to create the button. I guess if that works, we won’t need the SM plug-in for this particular purpose. However, we do plan to offer member-only content on the site at some point, so I will look into that when we get to it.

thanks

[Author]

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