Creating Unwanted Recurring Subscriptions In PayPal?

I have membership plans in Membership Pro that are set to 1-year durations but "Recurring Subscription?" is set to No. The plans are open to be manually renewable by members.

However, it's been reported to me that my members are getting auto-renewed, and automatically being billed by PayPal. This has led to a lot of manual refunds and manual expirations by me. Upon closer inspection, it appears that PayPal is generating these initial member registrations as "subscriptions" and auto-renewing each billing cycle (1-year) on their side unless I manually pause/terminate the PayPal billing cycles.

Shouldn't my configurations on Membership Pro be treated as single payments on PayPal? Or what settings within Membership Pro do I need to enable to tell PayPal that these subscriptions are only 1-year and not for auto-renew?

Hello Vince

Normally, when you set Recurring Subscription to No, it will be manual/onetime payment, not recurring payment.

Could you send me link to subscription form so that I can take a quick look to make sure it is right?

Tuan

Hi Tuan,

Thanks for replying. Here is what our registration form looks, like, as requested:
www.filmtvsound.com/index.php/subscripti...t-membership/sign-up

I can confirm that this is onetime subscription plan, so automatic payment as you described won't happen

Does the issue you are having happens with everyone? Or it just happens with some users only?

Tuan

It appears to be happening across all three of our membership plans.

Nothing I can see on the surface of the Membership Pro plugin seems to indicate whether a user is recurring or not. Their Start/End dates look normal (1-year, per our membership settings) and their invoice history only shows the most recent transaction (their newest payment, which would be the recent renewal).

From what all I can tell, I believe PayPal is recognizing all registrations as what they call "subscriptions" and setting them up as such, not as one-time payments. I am not sure if this "subscription" feature is new to PayPal or not. Interestingly, none of our membership plans have synced to PayPal (we are using the API), but the "Payment for #### Plan" is the listed transaction name, so something about the transaction from Membership Pro is being translated as a subscription on PayPal's end. Within PayPal, the 'subscription' has a yearly billing cycle (I'm not sure if this is default, or pulled from Membership Pro) and renews each billing cycle indefinitely. In the meantime I've manually "paused" all of these subscriptions for our users to stop PayPal from billing them.

I've confirmed that the Membership Pro -> PayPal integration is still functional. Refunded subscriptions from Membership Pro are reflected immediately in PayPal, and registrations on our site still go to PayPal. It is just curious to me how & why registrations are being treated as "subscriptions" by PayPal, even when the membership plan as-configured within the Membership Pro plugin shouldn't indicate such.

I've included screenshots of our membership plan's settings, and what one of the 'PayPal subscriptions' looks like.

Strange PayPal made it as a recurring subscription. Could you please submit a support ticket sending me super admin account of your site? I want to take a look at your latest subscriptions to see if it is one time or recurring subscription as you said

Tuan

Hi Tuan,

Thanks for taking the time to look into this issue. I've created support ticket #113590 as requested. Let me know in the ticket if you need any further info.

Thanks Vince. Will check and reply you via support ticket

Regards,

Tuan

So Tuan was very kind and custom-added a column to the Subscriptions list that displays "Is Recurring? Yes/No" that allows us to discern if new registrants are recurring members or not. Test cases we both tried no longer exhibited the undesired behavior (being created as recurring subscriptions), nor did these test accounts appear in PayPal as repeatable subscriptions (PayPal recognized them as one-time payments, as originally intended). So we don't know what caused our accounts to be generated as recurring.

For now, our fix is to keep an eye on new registered member accounts, and if any appear as recurring (using the new column info), we will just log into PayPal directly and manually pause/cancel the subscription billing for that payee. It's not a seamless fix, but it'll do for now if this weird behavior continues.

I don't think it would happen again. I believe the existing subscriptions were recurring because you had the plan as recurring plan in the past.

With the current setup, new subscriptions won't be recurring subscriptions anymore

Regards,

Tuan