Questions about setting up free trials, charging, and reminder emails
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Hello
I have a few questions about how to set up Paid Memberships Pro properly. I’ve checked your documentation but the documentation are either behind a paid membership or is not very helpful so I want to post my questions here.
1. I understand that we now need to use the Membership Expiration email template to send trial ending reminders. Can you clarify how to do this? There are no options that I can see that says something like “tick to send reminder email before subscription expires.” anyway so I don’t see how to activate the reminder emails.
2. Setting up a Free Trial:
When setting up a membership level, if I set up a membership that charges say $10 every month or 30 days, then to me, the expiry of the level is 30 days after a user buys this membership and I do not want it to renew automatically. So I tick “Check if this level has a recurring subscription payment.” then set up a “Billing Amount” as “$10 per 30 days” (so that the price is $10 every 30 days), then under “Expiration settings”, I tick “Check this to set when membership access expires”. However, when I do that, I get a warning that says “WARNING: This level is set with both a recurring billing amount and an expiration date. You only need to set one of these unless you really want this membership to expire after a certain number of payments.” This is really confusing to me.
The instructions on your documentation page here is confusing to me too, specificaly Method 1 step 3.
The result of the instructions in Step 3 is “The member will pay $0 at checkout, and the regular subscription payments will begin one month from their start date.”
I understand “paying $0 at checkout” means there is no signup fee, and if the “Billing Amount”?is a monthly price and $25 per 1 Month, I would expect to that the customer is charged $25 immediately and they get immediate access for the next month. This is probably the most intuitive way to charge people (and how all pre-paid systems work). Instead, it says “…payments will begin one month from their start date”.
What I don’t understand is this seems to charge customers after giving them access to the site for the duration of their subscription. The option in the plugin settings says “The amount to be billed one cycle after the initial payment.”. This confuses me and sounds like the customer will be charged after their first cycle ends, eg if it’s $10 every 30 days so the cycle is 30 days, then after their initial payment/signup fee (which could be zero if you don’t charge a sign up fee), you need to wait 30 days before you can charge the customer.
I want to charge them up front for the next cycle, whatever that might be, whether it is a week, month or year’s subscription, without charging a sign up fee, ie if it is $10 for 30 days, the user should pay $30 at sign up and their subscription will expire in 30 days after they signed up. If there is a one-off 7 day free trial, then it would be 7 days of free access, then charge them on the 8th day for the following 30 days of access).
Regarding the trial/membership ending reminder email, the warning says you can’t have a “recurring billing amount and an expiration date” at the same time. But I don’t see how else you can have a limited trial subscription: I need the “recurring” part because you pay everyy time period (eg every month) and the expiration date would be 30 days from sign up and you need to renew your membership manually after 30 days to continue using it.
3. I also don’t quite understand how to set up a “delay” in the subscription for a free trial that is different to the actual recurring subscription period – it would be so much more intuitive if we could just have an option such as a tick box or text box that says “Add free trial” “Select free trial period” than a “subscription delay” in an extra add on. Previously to save time, I tried to create a 2 day recurring subscription with a 1 day delay so that I don’t have to wait 60 days to see if a free 30 day trial works for a 30 day subscription (30 + 30 = 60, with one cycle being free). Apparently that isn’t how it works and I can’t do that. Could you explain how to set up a free trial of limited time period?
4. For some reason I had two test users sign up to a subscription level I made but in the Memberships -> Members, it shows the Level they signed uo for but under “Subscriptions”, there is nothing.
Thank you
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Hello Jarryd,
Thanks for checking up on this thread. Actually my issue is not resolved, but you can leave this thread as resolved since I think I will find an alternative. I’ve created 2 test subscriptions using 2 test users and their subscription is set to run out tomorrow (it ends on 6th of September). I could not get PMP to connect with a Stripe in test mode – I only managed to do this accidentally once and don’t have a clue how I did it and cannot replicate it. So I created the 2 test subscriptions in my wordpress dashboard instead using the PMP test mode (ie test mode payment instead of stripe as payment). I had 2 days trial and 2 days subscription but I never got the trial ending email (which earlier you stated in a different thread that we can use the “subscription ending” email) nor the subscription ending email, only the sign up confirmation email (I used the code “recipe” for changing the reminder email from 7 days to 1 day before trial ends). Also it is now in the subscription period since the 2 day trial period has ended but in the member subscriptions tab in PMP, it still says “no subscriptions”.
I’ve been trying this plugin for several months and I’m sorry to say it has been way too much work for what it is worth, and I just can’t get it to work, which is a shame since it is the only plugin that has something remotely related to what I need but it is just too difficult to set up.
Thanks
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