A Membership Pro "failed PayPal payment" leaves a user with a Pending account

I’m using Membership Pro 2.26.0 with PayPal as the payment system.

The form usually works, but today we had an issue.

The user submitted the membership form, but they informed us that PayPal had a glitch and did not allow the transaction to complete.

Now, the user is listed in our user database, but with a "0" member number and "Pending" instead of "Active."  We're using email as username, so the user cannot try signing up again with the same email address. 

It appears that the bug was on PayPal's side, not with Membership Pro (we did not get any error messages in the site).  PayPal may have had an outage at the time of the transaction.

PayPal did not receive a payment.  PayPal did not inform us of a failed payment, or pending payment.

Because we know the person who tried to sign up, they were able to inform us that PayPal had a glitch and the membership didn't go through.

But - we would not have known about the failed payment unless this person contacted us directly.

This is a significant issue because we will not personally know every potential user who tries to subscribe but fails.  And then we will not know about the issue.

Questions: 

1. Are there any admin notifications we can turn on to inform us of a failed PayPal payment?

2. If a PayPal payment fails, and the new user does not inform us that they had an issue, how do we know that any problem occurred?

3. We are using email address as username, so a user cannot re-register with the same email address if that email is tied to a "Pending" user account.  How can we help a user complete their subscription purchase if we don't have direct contact with the person?

4. How can Membership Pro inform a user that the payment transaction did not go through and also allow them to re-try signing up, given that their email has already been captured by the database?

Your help is appreciated.
 

I believe this membershipprodoc.joomservices.com/faqs/e...ccount-automatically should be the solution for your issue

Tuan

Hi Tuan,

I viewed the documentation, but I think that setting the approval to be automatic does not solve the issue. We tried this previously, but got spam sign-ups without payments.

We do not want to approve new subscriptions automatically because when it is turned on, a user can skip the PayPal payment and get into the site without paying.

I need to receive a notification when a user attempts to sign up but PayPal fails to collect payment (such as if PayPal has a glitch).

In our case, the user attempted to subscribe, but PayPal failed and the user could not complete the sign-up. The user's info was captured by Membership Pro and the user was listed as "Pending." The end result was that we were not notified of the sign-up problem (by Membership Pro or by PayPal), and it looks like if the user tries to subscribe again the membership would be declined because her email address was already captured by Membership Pro.

I could delete the user's info and make them try to sign up again, but that is a terrible user experience, and a lot of manual customer support work each time a PayPal payment fails.

This seems like a use case that could happen to any number of subscription sites.

BTW, our users are subscribing for access to our site. We are not selling subscriptions to software updates or anything like that. So, if the user has not paid first, they cannot access the site.

Question: Can Membership Pro notify me as Admin of a failed sign-up and/or a failed PayPal payment?

Your help is appreciated!

BTW: While typing my note, the forum logs me off. Can you increase the allowed login time on the forum? Thanks.

As of right now, we do not have a way to notify admin of failed payment. Please note that one users are redirected to PayPal, if they do not make payment, PayPal also does not inform Membership Pro about it (for example, users just close the browser), so actually, there is no way for Membership Pro to inform you about it

(There could be a system plugin (which runs every 2 hours for example) to collect these failed payments and send an email to admin (for example, 5 records during that 2 hours). But right now, we do not have it implemented yet

Tuan

Hi Tuan,

Thanks for getting back to me.

The current method provides an unsatisfactory customer experience because the customer cannot sign back in to complete the payment process because their email is already in the system and cannot be used again.

Please provide guidelines for writing a plugin with hooks that can access the "Pending" subscriptions (user email and name) so that we can notify the user right away when a payment has failed.

Your help is appreciated.

It needs to be a system plugin as I said. You can base on the code of plugins/system/osmembershipreminder/osmembershipreminder.php or plugins/system/osmembershipupdatestatus/osmembershipupdatestatus.php plugins

Regards,

Tuan