Community Support Forums

Hi guys,

So I am having trouble with PayPal upgrades and before I contact their terrible support staff, I figured I would ask you very helpful folk first to make sure the problem wasn't on the s2member end.

So, I had a PayPal customer try to upgrade their account from s2 member level 2 to s2member level 3. The price change went from 49.95 to 129.95 per month. However, in Paypal, a new payment profile for this user was created twice and then canceled twice while the original payment remained. Here is a screenshot of what the PayPal account looks like: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5922669/paypal.png

Does this have to do with Paypal's inability to increase payment amounts by a certain amount and this is what it does to prevent that instead of telling the user they can't do that. Or, is this an issue with how PayPal is receiving the info. I think it may be the first issue, since the user was upgraded on the s2member side of things.

Thanks as always, you guys are great!

Jeff

Hi Jeff.

Could you please post your s2Member IPN logs for PayPal? Particularly the entries for this customer, x'ing out any sensitive info.

I do know that PayPal has a 20% limit to what you can increase a recurring fee, so s2Member helps you work around this creating a new one and cancelling the previous one, but not twice as was your case.

Post the log entries and I'll ask Jason in the meantime, hopefully he'll be around later today and get to this thread.

Thanks!

Unfortunately, I did not have "Enable Logging Routines" set to yes, so I don't have any files in my s2member-logs file. Really sorry about that. If there is a way I can retroactively get these files, just let me know.

In the meantime, I contacted PayPal and they told me everything was fine and the person was registered for the correct recurring payment. They've "lied" to me before to get me off the phone, so I am not confident, but we'll see what happens tomorrow when the person is supposed to get charged.

Thanks for the quick reply.

Jeff

You're welcome Jeff. I know how important this is for you.

No, you can't log past events, but you can leave it on in case it happens again or you could do a test purchase on your own to see what happens and have it logged.

So PayPal changed what they said before? ... OK, I hope everything is fine with the charge to the customer tomorrow.

Let me know how it goes.

Thanks for reporting this important issue.
~ and thanks for bringing this to my attention Cristián.

jeffreygaudette wrote:Does this have to do with Paypal's inability to increase payment amounts by a certain amount and this is what it does to prevent that instead of telling the user they can't do that. Or, is this an issue with how PayPal is receiving the info. I think it may be the first issue, since the user was upgraded on the s2member side of things.

Yes, s2Member Pro DOES cancel the existing Recurring Profile, and it will then recreate a new Recurring Profile to replace the old one. This is how it works around the 20% rule. This way a Customer can upgrade/downgrade with any payment configuration you choose for the Pro Form.

However, it should NOT happen twice in a row like this. That's very interesting. If this happens again, please post your log file and I'll review this carefully to make sure it has nothing to do with s2Member Pro. For now though, it's very difficult to know exactly how this all came about within the code.

Just out of curiosity, do you have a Cancellation Form posted on your site anywhere? Is it possible that the Customer cancelled his account by mistake ( i.e. manually ) during the process of upgrading his account?

Hi Jason,

Thanks again for the reply. You guys have been truly amazing over the last few weeks.

To update, the users PayPal account was charged correctly today, so it seems everything worked as intended. If this happens again (seeing the double cancel) I will post the logs back here.

I am very happy you went around the PayPal 20% rule. That is one of the dumbest restrictions I've ever seen. I think the only issue with the way S2Member processes the payment now is that the "upgrade" creates a new account and new payment start date. That is to say if a member signs up for a plan that cost $25 per month on Tuesday and then on Wednesday they decide to upgrade to the $50 per month plan, their original $25 isn't accounted for or prorated in anyway. Basically, the member now pays $75 for that month (short a day).

I don't think there is much you can do about this and I personally would much rather avoid the 20% rule, but I just wanted to make you aware so if other users had this issue, they would know about it. I just went in and refunded the prorated amount to the user for their initial membership manually.

Thanks for the help!

Jeff