Problems with plan pricings being changed

Hi guys,

I've had to change the prices of the plans that exist on my client's website using CBSubs when you introduced the VAT system (as I had to include VAT in the plan price previously), however there were existing PayPal subscriptions in existence. I had thought that CBSubs would send an update to amend the PayPal subscription amounts or that somehow this amount would change, however I've just had an email to inform me that a member has been charged the previous rate due to the fact that they have a paypal subscription in effect.

Has this been considered?

I know that PayPal will only allow you to alter a subscription by 20% in 180 days however it doesn't seem that there has been any attempt to alter the existing paypal subscriptions when the plan amount has been changed, which I think is quite an important thing to happen, wouldn't you say?

How can I resolve this issue without telling every single person who has a PayPal subscription to cancel their subscription and re-establish it when they come to pay? Seems a bit daft and unprofessional.

Ruth

Any suggestions on how to resolve this would be greatly appreciated.

Hi Ruth,
First of all sorry for slow reply, this question was assigned to me and it went off the visible part of my todo list of last week. Not an excuse though.

- If your total price, taxes included, matches exactly the subscription plan, payments should continue working imho, As the payment basket remains same for existing subscriptions. Unless you edited database, manually, there should be no difference, as the payment subscriptions are related to baskets and not to plans prices, exactly for that purpose that if you change a plan price after people subscribe to (and agree and commit to) a given price and period, that things do not stop working as you feared.


- As far as I'm aware, with Paypal the seller can't increase the subscriptions, I didn't see yet the 20% you are mentioning. Additionally in case of decrease, that would have to be done in Paypal's backend as the Website Payments API doesn't allow change of subscriptions through the API.

Changing the pricing of existing auto-recurring subscriptions without action from customers, and specially in Paypal, is not supported by CBSubs 1.2. It would also sure cause for customer complaints too, something you do not wish in Ecommerce.

Hi Beat,

Thanks for the response, the prices of the plans were increased due to inflation etc, which is where the problem lies.

From what I understand it is possible to change the value of a subscription through the PayPal API by up to 20% of the subscription cost every 180 days but I'm not sure how this would work with CBSubs.

Clearly something needs to happen though, because there will be people who need to change the value of their plans, and if there are subscriptions already set up, they will be automatically paying the wrong amount when it comes to renewal time.

Is there any way to change the amount either at the point where the user renews (inform them that the price has changed and have them accept) or by blanket mailing those with valid subscriptions informing them that they must do something or other to update the cost of their subscription?

At the moment I'm somewhat embarrassed having provided the paypal subscriptions system which is now completely screwing up their membership service due to the price of the plans having increased but subscriptions haven't. Also, the regular paypal system has had to be taken completely offline for several weeks now pending another ticket/bug I have placed relating to completely incorrect data being sent to Paypal which afaik hasn't been resolved and there is no timeframe, so all in all it's a bit of a failure as there is currently NO online payment system available at all

Ruth

Ok, inflation is not VAT

So, good news, there is no bug regarding current paypal subscriptions.
We will contact you regarding your other support issue separately: I had the impression that it wasn't such a road-blocker for you.

Back to this "inflation" thread:
Regarding the feature request to change the price of a standing Paypal payment subscription:

As far as changing the prices of current subscriptions with website payment standard, that is done by unsubscribing and resubscribing by the customer:

I'm not aware of such a 20%/180 days feature for "Website Payments Standard" API of Paypal. Could you please provide me url of the information about the +20%/180 days of paypal autorecurring subscription payments with website payments standard ?

The 2 other ways for that feature that I see are:

1) Paypal's express checkout and Website Payments Pro APIs allows that, but that's a different API, which to my knowledge is not available worldwide, and which is thus not implemented in CBSubs.

2) Another way to solve this feature is to use use another, alias-manager-based, payment service provider (e.g. Ogone), that CBSubs supports, that's easy on CBSubs's side.

In both cases, we would need to add the feature of mass-changing existing orders (baskets) of existing customers in the admin side of CBSubs...