Recurring Payment + Expiring Membership Level + Member Status Updated

[jscmal]

Hi,
I have recently introduced in my website the Membership Levels with Quarterly Expiration Date. The subscription is 3 months long.

Today a Premium Member who uses a 3 months plan with recurring payment, was Turned to Expired because the 3 Months Plan have expired Aug 31.

Just a few minutes ago his paypal recurring payment has paid his subscription for other 3 months and the payment is logged in the plugin payments page.

I went to his Profile and I have seen that the status was set to Expired.

Then I realized that the user was in the Expired Status since the beginning of this day and when the payment was completed, his Status was not updated and the “Access Starts” Date was not updated too.

So, I had to manage these things manually. I updated the Access Starts Date and I turned the user to Active.

– Why the plugin doesn’t make these things automatically basing the expiration on the Date and the Time of user registration?

– Why a new payment doesn’t update the user data for a renew of the account?

– Why the expiration date of the Membership Level doesn’t use also the TIME of the registration/renew to turn an account to expired?

It is a little bit problematic.

At least a new payment should updated the status of the account.

A manual action for every user is a very prohibitive thing.

Kindly would you implement for the future an automatic update of these user data for any new payment by the users?

Kind regards

G.Aloe

[mbrsolution]

Hi, I have sent a message to the developers to investigate further your issue and your request. Just one question did you by any chance have the Debug Mode option enabled? If you did can you check the log file. Report back with any findings in the log file.

Thank you

[admin]

Usually for a subscription type payment you set the membership level setting to “No Expiry”. So as long as the payment keeps coming, the member’s account will be active. If the payment stops, the account gets blocked. All this happens automatically.

Fixed duration value is used for a one time payment type setup. For example: pay $50 for a 3 months access. After the 3 month they can pay another one time fee again to get more access.

You seem to be using it in a slightly different way. I will add a tweak to the plugin so it can update the account status for a subscription payment even when the membership level setting is set to a fixed duration.

[TroyWolf]

Usually for a subscription type payment you set the membership level setting to “No Expiry”. So as long as the payment keeps coming, the member’s account will be active. If the payment stops, the account gets blocked.

I am glad I read this. Like others, I have my expiry set to 1 year. My members pay via subscription that should auto-renew every year. I assumed this was the correct way to set it up–so it will expire if the payment fails for whatever reason.

Instead, you are saying we should set our memberships to No Expiry and trust that the system will block the account if the annual renewal payment fails. Correct?

[jscmal]

Hi,
the situation is this.

I have set the 3 months duration for that Membership Level, because in this way the user is able to have under eyes the Expiration Date of his Subscription. So when the expiring date is coming he can refund his PayPal Account and Continue with the Recurring Payment.

With the features that the Plugin Offers today, this thing gives also another advantage:

– when the user stops the recurring payment (and many times I see people who use to stop it just after a few moments since the registration), I can turn the user to Active and let it use the 3 months that he has paid and at the expiration date his account will be turned to inactive automatically.

In practice the main reason why I have the recurring payment + Membership Levels that expire is that the user is able to SEE the Expiration Date.

What is not good is that the service makes expire the subscription on the Day (maybe at midnight). but not on the TIME where the previous payment was done.

A fixing on this thing will make able to use Expiration Date with Recurring Payments in a very good way. Because a user that is going to renew his subscription never will experience to see his account Expired, although it can be only for just a few hours.

Kind regards

G.Aloe

[TroyWolf]

Some good points by @jscmal.

Even though a member signs up with an auto-renewing PayPal subscription, I still want the user to see their expiration date as 1 year out. That is what they have paid for so far. (Or 3 months for @jscmal’s site)

When the auto-renew happens, then yes, the expiration date should get bumped out a year.

Even more important to me, and as @jscmal points out, if a member cancels their subscription in PayPal, their membership should still be good until the expiration date. Cancelling a PayPal subscription is not the same thing as cancelling a membership in my website–and since there is no refund, the member should continue to enjoy the membership period they paid for. I think I’ve seen other support threads about this situation–that currently SM will cancel the membership if the subscription is cancelled. Is this correct?

Thanks!

[admin]

The new version of the plugin should handle this better.

[jscmal]

Thank you very much. I updated the plugin.

[Author]

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