Sub renewed but should not have

Wow. Not surprising

Hi, CommonTater. Thanks for using PMPro. Sorry for the issue you’ve run int.

so I turned off that level

What do you mean by this? Did you update the price? Or set the level to hidden? When you do either of those things, PMPro does NOT automatically cancel the associated subscriptions for users who previously signed up for the level.

To cancel those subscriptions, you can edit the users and then change their level from the edit user page, and check the box to “cancel the existing subscription at the gateway”. This will change the user’s level and cancel their subscription.

You can also find the subscriptions at the gateway and cancel them there. This will cancel the subscription, then send an IPN/webhook to your site that PMPro should read and cancel their membership on the site. If you want them to retain access, but just cancel the payment part, then using the method above is better

Why would a subscriber be charged for a renewal in 2023, given that they were not charged in 2022?

Depending on how your levels are set up with trials, prorating, our cancel on next payment date add on, there are cases where a user checking out pays for the current and following years. We’d have to see your setup to figure out exactly what happened.

How can I ensure that this does not happen again?

You should log into PayPal and look for subscription there that you don’t want to have and make sure they are cancelled at the gateway. The recurring orders are initiated by PayPal.

Can I delete a membership level that has subscribers? And would this prevent them from being charged again? What level would they have?

You can delete levels. It WON’T delete the associated subscriptions. (It used to, but more often people were accidentally cancelling those subs they didn’t want to.) If you delete a user’s level, they won’t have any level.

You can use the PMPro Toolkit add on to both cancel all of the subs and move those users from one level to another. You can find the add on on GitHub as well if you don’t have access through our site.

https://www.paidmembershipspro.com/add-ons/pmpro-toolkit/

Look for these options under Tools > Toolkit Scripts after activating the plugin.

• Cancel all members with ____ level ID?. WILL also cancel any recurring subscriptions.
• Give all non-members ____ level ID?.

Some more information on deleting levels here: https://www.paidmembershipspro.com/documentation/membership-levels/delete-membership-level/

@zo1111 I encourage you to keep your replies in the forums constructive.

Hi Jason,

Thanks for your reply, and these helpful tips.

“so I turned off that level” >> What do you mean by this? Did you update the price? Or set the level to hidden?

Answer: I set the level to hidden to ensure that no new subscribers chose that level. My intention was to offer only the free subscription, moving forward. I had thought that this turns off the recurring subscription, but sounds like that’s not the case.

This site is a part-time project, and I haven’t been able to devote as much time as I wanted to keeping up my knowledge of PMP.

It’s a little disheartening that this subscriber decided to go to PayPal instead of writing us directly. PayPal is looking into the chargeback that the subscriber filed with them, and has charged me their $15 fee for that and has put the subscription fee on hold. Something to be aware of, especially if the membership fees you charge are less than $15 or you tend to withdraw your PayPal earnings regularly.

Again, thanks for the tips. I’ll be looking into the site’s setup and also PayPal to see how to prevent this in the future.

Turning off a level will only remove visibility of it on the front-end of your site and not cancel any active subscriptions.

If you can, I’d recommend reaching out to the user and see if they will close their dispute so that you can manually refund them instead. Sometimes this works.

If you have any other questions though please feel free to start a new topic.