Error subscribing to Merchandise

The contents of my #_cbsubs_plan table match 1 for 1 with what is listed in the Paid Subscriptions/Plans screen.

I do have exclusive plans but none that are involved with this user. I have set both plans he is subscribed to to be non-exclusive and public access to see if that resolves the issue, but no joy.

BTW I am using the URL to directly add the merchandise plan to his basket so he can pay for it right away from a link in an article.

I do have exclusive plans but none that are involved with this user.

What do you mean by this? They can't access those plans at all due to access permissions? You've them conditioned away? Having exclusive plans will do this. If you've exclusive plans only accessible by URL the combination check is still made and will still result in that error.

So I set all my plans to be non-exclusive and the payment for the merchandise item now goes through. What I don't understand is why does having an exclusive plan that the user is neither subscribed to nor attempting to subscribe to cause an issue with a merchandise payment.

I am using the URL to add the merchandise item into the users basket so he can pay for it right away.

The way I have my plans set up maybe due to not being very familiar with CBSubs when I initially did it, but here how it went.

Initially I wanted to have a 1 year free subscription plus a few paid subscriptions that people could choose from. That way when the free subscription expired the user would once again be presented with options to re-activate there free subscription or pay for a new paid subscription. It was a marketing decision. In retrospect I think it caused more challenges than it was worth and have subsequently moved to Free for Life.

Anyway now let's call the plans I have Free, Charter, Associate and OEM. It didn't seem to make sense for someone to subscribe to the Charter membership as an owner of a RV and an OEM membership as a manufacturer so I made them exclusive. The same thing applies to an Associate membership which is neither an owner nor an OEM so it too is exclusive.

Now down the road when the Charter membership period ended, a Regular membership was added and the Charter membership was set to not allow new subscriptions but people could still renew their Charter membership. At the same time I created a 2 year charter membership that people could upgrade to for a discount. I protected the 2 year membership by giving Access to a user group that was set when the original Charter membership was subscribed to so no one could start a new 2 year subscription unless they have an active charter membership.

Unfortunately when I copied the Charter membership plan to create the 2 Year version CBSubs placed the copy as a child of the Charter membership plan but I did not see that at the time.

When I was working on this issue originally I was able to resolve the problem by changing the 2 year Charter Membership to be a Top level plan. What happened with the user that I was testing with is the original Charter Membership had expired but the 2 year version had not. That was stopping the payment of the Merchandise item to go through.

Now with this new user, both his Charter and 2 Year Charter were still active. Moving the 2 year charter plan to be non-exclusive top level plan did not solve the problem with the Merchandise item payment. It was only when I set all plans to be non-exclusive (Associate & OEM as well) would the merchandise payment work.

I don't understand the interaction between the merchandise item and the OEM and Associate subscriptions since the user was only subscribed to Charter and 2 year Charter.

That all said, I'm at least happy that it now appears to be working and I'll focus on my other merchandise issue which is the topic of another thread.

Thanks for your help.

If you've a top level exclusive plan then that plan is mandatory. Doesn't matter if it's not included in the basket or plan specific URL. If it's exclusive, top level, and the user can access it then it'll cause that error if they don't select it. One way around this is to condition it away using conditions under Workflows. You'd basically condition it away if another plan is selected. The alternative is to make it non-exclusive as you've experienced. Example scenario as follows

Plan 1 - Exclusive
Plan 2 - Non-Exclusive

Lets say I link directly to the basket of Plan 2. If I do that I'll get the error you experienced since Plan 1 is exclusive (mandatory). So my link needs to include both or Plan 1 needs be non-exclusive as well.

Using parent plans can workaround this if you need exclusive plans. Example as follows.

Plan 1 - Non-Exclusive Free Lifetime
- Plan 1a - Exclusive
- Plan 1b - Exclusive
Plan 2 - Non-Exclusive

With the above I should be able to subscribe to plan 2 by it self fine.

So my users aren't real smart. I would like to use the parent/child version that you suggest but will Plan 1 Non-Exclusive Free Lifetime have to also be selected in order to subscribe to plan 1a or 1b, or will it automatically be subscribed to when the user selects either 1a or 1b?

Also will I be in a world of hurt with my existing subscriptions if I rework how they are organized? Would I also then have to make sure to mass subscribe all my users to Plan 1? Is there a way to simply have a Plan Group that really does nothing other than add a way of organizing plans?

So my users aren't real smart. I would like to use the parent/child version that you suggest but will Plan 1 Non-Exclusive Free Lifetime have to also be selected in order to subscribe to plan 1a or 1b, or will it automatically be subscribed to when the user selects either 1a or 1b?

When clicking plan 1a or plan 2b it will automatically select plan 1. If you use a direct URL you need to ensure that URL includes plan 1 in addition to plan 1a or plan 1b though.

Also will I be in a world of hurt with my existing subscriptions if I rework how they are organized? Would I also then have to make sure to mass subscribe all my users to Plan 1?

I honestly wouldn't make any drastic changes to plans like re-parenting them if you have recurring subscriptions already running. If you're not using recurring subscriptions then any changes you make are perfectly safe.

Is there a way to simply have a Plan Group that really does nothing other than add a way of organizing plans?

Nope.