Membership Status Change

  • I’ve been studying and testing how RC manages changes to membership status (active, pending, cancelled, expired). I noticed that when a test payment failed for a member, their membership status remained active for a while. I thought perhaps it might have to do with paypal’s payment retries. But then, I looked at the membership form again and I noticed that I had checked the “never expires” box for the expiration date of the test member (in my mind, that meant the membership would be guaranteed to auto-renew, even though there’s a separate auto-renew checkbox). Which now has me thinking perhaps that’s what prevented the membership from going to “expired” status once the payment failed.

    Can someone please clarify the logic driving the status changes, especially at renewal? It looks like RC transiently ‘expires’ a membership at the renewal date unless there’s a successful payment attempt. In which case, if I’m setting a membership to “never expire”, then regardless of the outcome of a payment attempt, the membership stays “active” and the member continues to have access to restricted content. Am I correct in this suspicion? If so, I’d like to propose an addition to the documentation to explain this. I can volunteer to do the write-up.

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  • Plugin Support favoriteswan

    (@favoriteswan)

    Hi there. The “never expire” setting is not the deciding factor – or it’s not supposed to be as the software was written.

    Stripe is the payment gateway that Restrict Content has so I’ll refer to that gateway here though other gateways do retry to get payment. Ordinarily, Stripe retries several times to get the payment to go through and then sends a message to RC to “Expire” the membership so the customer would no longer have access to content. If RC and Stripe are not configured effectively, then RC and the payment gateway will not communicate back and forth causing a breakdown.

    Hope this clarifies things a bit. Let me know.

    Thread Starter Ryan

    (@fremzy)

    Hi @favoriteswan,

    Thanks for responding. If I understand you correctly, it sounds like you’re saying there is NO status update in RC when a Stripe payment fails UNTIL after the several Stripe retries and Stripe cancels the subscription. Am I correct in this understanding?

    If so, I think this is a defect in RC logic. Let me explain. If I’m running a digital content business and using RC to manage access to my content, I don’t want customers to have access at all IMMEDIATELY when there is a failure to renew due to payment failure. BUT I still want Stripe to be able to retry payment attempts in the hopes that there can be a successful renewal (customers are notified when payment fails and they may take action to correct the issue). This ensures that customers are motivated to proactively keep their payment method issue-free and promptly address it if any issue arises. Allowing access to restricted content after payment has failed and during retry attempts compromises the revenue of the content provider. An observant customer can purposely elect not to allow successful payment processing knowing they’ll get an extra 2 weeks of free access to the content.

    And this scenario is possible with Stripe because Stripe publishes payment failure events before it moves the subscription to a cancelled state after retries have failed. So, I think it would make sense to tie access in RC to the payment failed event rather than the subscription cancelled event.

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
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