New subscriptions immediately cancelled after creation

Hi Lisa,

Sorry for the delayed response – we had to wait for some new memberships to come through to confirm this. Unfortunately it is still happening after the update.

My client just spent an hour on the phone with paypal to make sure it wasn’t their end. They said that the API from the software sends out a cancellation request for the recurring payment profile immediately (30 secs) after people sign up.

Carla

One additional piece of information that might be helpful is that the only recurring payments that are being immediately cancelled are those which used a credit card directly rather than a PayPal account.

Looking at the code, it appears that the pmpro_changeMembershipLevel method could be called twice in this case, once from checkout.php, and then again from ipnhandler.php which would cancel the “old” membership created 30 seconds ago.

Unfortunately the only short term solution for us is to switch back to PayPal Express in order to avoid direct credit card purchases on recurring payments.

I believe you are correct RE the call to pmpro_changeMembershipLevel in the IPNHandler cancelling the subscription. I will check this out and get a fix out ASAP.

I am getting problem of new subscriptions immediately cancelled after creation… Someone sorted this issue?

Same happening here. It happens with Paypal account and card.

Today test it with my test membership account and with a Paypal account, everything works perfect. But today an member try to sign up again and the subscription was cancelled after creation at paypal, giving the access to the content without paying.

We’ve seen this happen too with the PayPal Express gateway on PMPro 1.6.1 and earlier, but usually it’s due to the lag in when the PayPal order is placed and when payment clears – meaning, payment never clears, but the user has access to everything on the site until we catch it. A few weeks ago we had it happen where the transaction on the PayPal side was being immediately canceled right after the user submits it, which is what it sounds like you all are reporting. Strangely, we were able to get that customer to pay for another product we sell using the PMPro Addon Packages and payment went through just fine. It seemed to be something to do with subscriptions or recurring payments. But we have other customers signing up every day with that with no problem. Had hoped that this was going to be resolved with 1.7.1 but it sounds like you are on that already and still same problem?

Hi, Guys. Thanks for the info. I have looked into this and couldn’t recreate the problem. I couldn’t even figure out a mechanism where this would happen.

If you can reliably reproduce it (it does seem to be fairly random for people it’s happening to), let me know as much information as you can about your levels and the order history for the users, etc.

Feel free to email me the information (especially if you are a PMPro member).

My latest theory on this immediate-cancel thing is that it’s users who are in countries that PayPal deems high-risk for fraud. I don’t have enough data to back it up yet but it seems like this happens for customers in Eastern European countries the most. I’m not getting it for my customers from India, who often have lots of problems with PayPal, so this theory may not hold water, but it’s the only pattern I’ve seen so far.

Thanks for the update on that. This one has been stupid hard to track down.