alerttopia wrote:If I were to switch to a PayPal Pro + Recurring Billing account and use the s2member Pro forms to cancel subscriptions, the system would be smart enough to cancel the subscriptions without my interaction.
Yes, this is correct. s2Member Pro Forms interact directly with the PayPal® "Pro" API, so many things become possible, which by default are not. s2Member Pro Cancellation Forms will "cancel" Recurring Profiles that were created through the PayPal® Pro API originally ( i.e. Customers never leave your site ). This assumes that you are running with a PayPal® Pro account.
s2Member Pro Cancellation Forms are also smart enough to detect when it's a PayPal account "Subscription" too. In that case, your site will ask the Customer to log into their PayPal account ( providing a special link ), which takes them to the current active PayPal "Subscriptions" they have with your site; and allows them to cancel easily.
* But please note. "Enhanced Recurring Profiles" are still a very new concept over at PayPal, and in my tests, the PayPal® Pro API is NOT capable of cancelling an "Enhanced Recurring Profile" that was established through a PayPal Standard account. Therefore, s2Member Pro Cancellation Forms will NOT be capable of dynamically cancelling an Enhanced Recurring Profile ( why? I have no idea, you'll have to ask PayPal why this is ). I would certainly like this to be possible, but unfortunately, it's not. The only way to cancel an Enhanced Recurring Profile that was paid for with a credit card, is by contacting the site owner and asking them to cancel you manually. Please see: https://www.x.com/message/202693#202693Re: Does ERB enable users to unsubscribe without paypal account?
PP_MTS_Chad, wrote:
Correct, if the buyer signed up for a subscription where the they did not use a PayPal account but instead used a credit card through the Enhanced Recurring Payments flow, they would need to contact the merchant to cancel the subscription. As the merchant, you can either log in and manually do this, or if your subscriptions start with an I- instead of an S-, you can use the ManageRecurringPaymentProfileStatus API to cancel the profile through an API call, so you could technically set up an interface on your site to do this if your profiles start with an I-.
* According to his statement, s2Member Pro Cancellation Forms *should* be able to cancel an "Enhanced Recurring Profile" too, since s2Member Pro Cancellation Forms do use the "ManageRecurringPaymentsProfileStatus" API call. But in my tests, this was not the case. Perhaps it's changed since our last round of testing? Please let me know if you have any luck. I have a ticket awaiting update with PayPal MTS as well, regarding this specific issue.If the above is true for the PayPal Standard + ERP account, this leads to another question: If I cancel the customer's subscription from within my PayPal account, doesn't the EOT happen immediately? Which doesn't follow the "cancellation" workflow, by which the customer would continue to have access until the renewal date would be reached; at which point the EOT should happen.
No, the EOT may not happen immediately, even when/if you cancel the Customer's account manually from inside your PayPal account. Instead, this would trigger a "Delayed EOT". In other words, the Customer's billing is cancelled, and s2Member sets an EOT Time that will occur in the future, depending on several factors, as detailed below.
*Understanding Cancellations* It's important to realize that a Cancellation is not an EOT ( End Of Term ). All that happens during a Cancellation event, is that billing is stopped, and it's understood that the Customer is going to lose access, at some point in the future. This does NOT mean, that access will be revoked immediately. A separate EOT event will automatically handle a (demotion or deletion) later, at the appropriate time; which could be several days, or even a year after the Cancellation took place.
*Some Hairy Details* There might be times whenever you notice that a Member's Subscription has been cancelled through your Payment Gateway... but, s2Member continues allowing the User access to your site as a paid Member. Please don't be confused by this... in 99.9% of these cases, the reason for this is legitimate. s2Member will only remove the User's Membership privileges when an EOT ( End Of Term ) is processed, a refund occurs, a chargeback occurs, or when a cancellation occurs - which would later result in a delayed Auto-EOT by s2Member. s2Member will not process an EOT ( End Of Term ) until the User has completely used up the time they paid for. In other words, if a User signs up for a monthly Subscription on Jan 1st, and then cancels their Subscription on Jan 15th; technically, they should still be allowed to access the site for another 15 days, and then on Feb 1st, the time they paid for has completely elapsed. At that time, s2Member will remove their Membership privileges; by either demoting them to a Free Subscriber, or deleting their account from the system ( based on your configuration ). s2Member also calculates one extra day ( 24 hours ) into its equation, just to make sure access is not removed sooner than a Customer might expect.
Posted: May 13th, 2011, 12:10 am