Existing Subscribers Becoming Transactional-Only in MailChimp

Hi @bbalhorn, sorry to hear you’re having issues with the plugin, we want to try to help out. This is not the expected behavior of the plugin as subscribed users in Mailchimp prior to purchase should remain subscribed even if they don’t check the opt-in box at a later checkout.

Just to get a handle on the situation you’re experiencing, could you provide a few more pieces of information to help us understand the issue?

– What plugin version are you using?
– Do you have any caching services or plugins active?
– Is there a recent order where the customer had accepted marketing at checkout, you can see this by viewing the customer on the order. If mailchimp_woocommerce_is_subscribed is equal to 1 they opted in at checkout. This value is located in the Custom Fields (usually below the order details).
– Does a customer in question have an account with the store?

We look forward to hearing back from you.

Thanks!

• This reply was modified 2 years, 1 month ago by khungate.

Thanks for the response,

– Version is 7.2.5
– We don’t have any caching plugins, but we use WPengine with a caching feature (no changes in how we’ve done caching since the problem began)
– Yes, we’re seeing the mailchimp_woocommerce_is_subscribed as 1 for people who accept marketing at checkout. If it matters, we haven’t ever seen mailchimp_woocommerce_is_subscribed as 0, it would instead just not appear in the order details. I’m assuming that’s expected but including it just in case.
– I do believe most if not all of these users would have existing accounts on our store.

Hi @bbalhorn, thanks for the follow up information. Would you care to enable Remote Diagnostics from the plugin’s settings tab, provide your store URL and an order ID where this change was observed?

We’ll be glad to investigate further.

Thanks!

Sounds good, @khungate! Remote Diagnostics should not be enabled on pahls.com, an example order you can use is #280288 from October 3rd.

Hey There – we are experiencing the same issue, did you get this resolved?

I’m also seeing the same issue, only we’re also seeing this with unsubscribed contacts’ email marketing permissions being changed to “non-subscribed.”

• This reply was modified 1 year, 11 months ago by michelleswg.

Any updates?

We are also having the same issue.

If there isn’t a solution, is there at least a band-aid solution?

I’m at a loss as to how to mitigate the damage, because disconnecting the integration won’t undo the damage already done to our mailing list. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Update: Mailchimp support is claiming this bug is caused by Opt In Monster. Is anyone else here using Opt In Monster?

@michelleswg Having the same issue, doesn’t seem to happen to every person if they don’t tick the box and are an existing subscribers but happens on the odd occasion. Not running any conflicting plugins.

@khungate Any progress on a fix for this?

I thought I would also chime in here and say that we are also experiencing this issue daily in which Mailchimp support has recommended we start disactivating plugins and change back to the original storefront theme.

We’ve found it difficult to establish why exactly this is happening and have tried at least a dozen purchase attempts using multiple emails subscribed to our mailing list.

What we have found is that this is completely random, with the functionality of the ‘opt-in for email marketing’ often having no effect. We experience the status of subscribers changing daily, from ‘subscribed’ to ‘transactional emails only’,

We simply cannot operate as an e-commerce store when our subscribers are being converted to non-subscribers with often no fault of their own.

This is a really unfortunate incident that we feel will not be resolved in the short term and has no clear indication of where the problem lies with the Mailchimp plugin.

@stefanthefibreco Exactly the same process. I can see in the debug logs when it goes transactional, but don’t understand why/how it does it. Again completely random. I’ve tried unticking the add to mailing list and seeing if that does it. Wondering if abandon cart has something to do with it?

@rtjohnson Looking at the activity of some of the profiles that have been converted to non-subscribers, I can’t see any sign that they were affected by the cart abandonment automation.

I’ve tried many scenarios of purchasing products whilst selecting different opt-in buttons on the checkout, however I have not successfully been able to turn my subscribed emails into non-subscribed accounts.

At this point, I am out of ideas and so is Mailchimp support I believe. We pay a monthly subscription to use Mailchimp and all we see are subscribers being removed from our mailing list in which they have not opted-out to receive email marketing from us.

I don’t know where to look next when it comes to diagnosing the issue.

@stefanthefibreco @rtjohnson have you updated the plugin to 2.8? This has new features that would allow you to have more fine grain control over “subscribed”, “unsubscribed”, and “transactional” on the user profile and in the store’s admin.

I would also want to know what plugins you’re using that could possibly be impacting this type of flow, or possibly API driven orders that might be acting differently?

We’ve not been able to replicate this in any of our testing environments, but we would really like to help you figure out the issue.

If you would enable the “remote diagnostics” and ping us back we can take a closer look at things that might help troubleshoot too.