XF 2.3 Migrating to a different PayPal account

[theterminator93]

We've got a number of users who have user upgrades applied to their accounts, with start/end dates scattered throughout the year. We've been using Legacy PayPal as the payment processor.

We're switching to a different PayPal account and creating a new payment profile to go with it, and plan to apply the new payment profile to the existing membership upgrades we have set up so new upgrades automatically use the new PayPal details.

The conundrum I'm trying to sort out is how to transition our existing users with existing upgrades over to the new PayPal profile so that renewals use the new account. Correct me if I'm wrong on these counts, please:

Users will need to cancel auto-renewal within PayPal on their end to prevent payment from going to the old PayPal account. We cannot do this on their behalf.​

Users will need to re-upgrade their accounts in order to authorize payments to the new PayPal account and payment profile​

If users choose to do this, I know we can manually adjust the end date of their upgrade to match the end date of the old payment profile upgrade. We don't want people to "lose" time on last year's memberships, if that makes sense.

My question is if we adjust the user upgrade end date after they re-upgrade their accounts, will PayPal's auto-renewal process based on the updated renewal date set in XF? Or will PayPal auto-renew one year based on the start date?

(A side question - if there's a better way to do this that is easier for our users, I'd be all ears!)

Thanks for any thoughts.

 

[Kevin]

Users will need to cancel auto-renewal within PayPal on their end to prevent payment from going to the old PayPal account. We cannot do this on their behalf.

You can view subscriptions to your account at this link below and also cancel them.

Log in to your PayPal account

Transfer money online in seconds with PayPal money transfer. All you need is an email address.

www.paypal.com

Users will need to re-upgrade their accounts in order to authorize payments to the new PayPal account and payment profile

Yes. Whether you have them cancel the subscription on their end or if you proactively cancel them there is no way of transferring the subscription to a different PP account. Everybody with a subscription will need to initiate a new subscription from their side.

One thing I advise is making sure you have a big announcement thread somewhere letting folks know about the switch and even consider sending out a bulk email to your subscribers with your staff ready for the responses. Even when we did our best to make sure people were aware of why we were cancelling subscriptions and why the PP account was changing we still had a few folks thinking that the cancelled subscriptions were somehow an indicator of our community shutting down, especially for the folks who had active subscriptions but didn't visit on a regular basis and missed both the announcement thread, the discussions, and the email blast.

 

[theterminator93]

I appreciate the insights and feedback. I've been moving forward on this and for some reason (that PP support can't explain or help with) I have no visibility of or control over the automatic subscriptions people have set up to come to my PP account. They told me the only way for me to stop them (if the senders do not cancel them from their own PP dashboards) is to block their accounts on my end.

At any rate, I've run into a snag when people are trying to re-subscribe with the new PP account set up in XF. They log in to PP, review the terms of the subscription and when they click "Continue" to finalize the transaction, they are getting an error from PayPal that says:

Something went wrong
Please go back to [forum name] and choose another way to pay. PayPal isn't available at this time.

I've ruled out the PayPal account and payment profile in XF as the issue, as when I attempted to subscribe my own account as a test, it went through without any issue.

My deduction is that something isn't working because accounts that previously had upgraded using the old PP profile and account are trying to re-subscribe to a new PP account and payment profile. Is PP refusing to let them upgrade because it sees that a [term length] subscription is still in place to our forum and refusing to allow another one to be set up simultaneously?

Any ideas?

 

[Kevin]

I appreciate the insights and feedback. I've been moving forward on this and for some reason (that PP support can't explain or help with) I have no visibility of or control over the automatic subscriptions people have set up to come to my PP account. They told me the only way for me to stop them (if the senders do not cancel them from their own PP dashboards) is to block their accounts on my end.

Does anything come up for you at https://www.paypal.com/billing/subscriptions -- At least for me that was where I was able to view all of my subscribers and manually cancel them.

Something went wrong
Please go back to [forum name] and choose another way to pay. PayPal isn't available at this time.

So they're logged into PP and getting a message saying that PP isn't available?

My deduction is that something isn't working because accounts that previously had upgraded using the old PP profile and account are trying to re-subscribe to a new PP account and payment profile. Is PP refusing to let them upgrade because it sees that a [term length] subscription is still in place to our forum and refusing to allow another one to be set up simultaneously?

In XF, do you still see them with an active subscription?

 

[theterminator93]

Does anything come up for you at https://www.paypal.com/billing/subscriptions -- At least for me that was where I was able to view all of my subscribers and manually cancel them.

Ha! There they all are! (Why PP support had no idea this existed or could give me that info is ... perhaps not unexpected but still disappointing). THANK YOU!

But yes, as far as what's in XF, I manually downgraded the members' accounts after I got the email notification that they canceled their subscriptions to me. They show up in the "Expired user upgrades" section.