5.5 Managing Subscriptions

MemberPress gives you the ability to manage the subscriptions of your users on a basic level, to give you more administrative control. Below are a few managing techniques in bold followed by a brief explanation. If you feel like one of your issues isn't addressed here, please send us a support ticket.

Transactions are recorded in the gateway, but not in MemberPress - This usually means that your IPN's or Webhook's aren't set up correctly in your gateway. Please review the set up processes for your gateway as explained in it's respective link found on this page.

Offering partial refunds - All of the payment gateways currently supported by MemberPress allow you to process partial refunds. To do this you will need to first go into your gateway and process the refund. If you are unsure on how to do that in your gateway(s) then follow this link and click on the specific gateway in the list near the bottom of the page to learn how. After the refund has been processed you'll need to wait a few minutes for the transaction in MemberPress to be changed to "refunded". Then you'll need to edit that transaction by switching it back to "complete" and change the amount to reflect the partial refund. NOTE: it is essential that you change the status from "refunded" to "complete" immediately, because if not the user will lose access to your protected content.

Changing the price or terms on a membership and wanting everyone to have the changes applied to their current subscriptions - Because of MemberPress' interaction with payment gateways, any changes made to the terms of a membership will only affect new sign ups, not existing ones. So, for the new terms to be applied, the user's current subscription needs to either reach its point of expiration or it needs to be canceled. You can always encourage your users to sign up with the new terms by cancelling their current subscription's manually one at a time. Providing discounts for the first initial payment could also be a good technique to encourage users to update to the new membership terms.

Manually Managing Subscriptions - Quite often site owners want to accept payments manually, via check or some other means, or simply want to give free access to a member or even staff. MemberPress makes this easy -- what you'll want to do is head to the MemberPress -> Transactions menu, and click on the "Add New" button at the top of the page. Here you can manually add Transactions for individual users and select which Membership the payment was for, mark it as "complete", and set when it expires. The member will now have access until their manual Transaction expires. Important Note: Creating manual transactions means they will not be recorded on the level of the gateway and no actual charge will be made. Also, because these manual transactions do not automatically recur - they will be listed under the one-time subscriptions tab instead of the recurring tab. Still wondering how to create a manual transaction? Click here for more help!

Manually changing the billing date or price for a users subscription - Stripe is currently the only gateway that allows you to accomplish this. Stripe Support states, " You’re currently able to change the price of a plan by creating a new plan altogether. This gives you more control over what existing subscribers are ultimately charged." For more info on how to accomplish this according to Stripe Support please visit this source here.

Manually changing a user to another subscription and/or with another gateway - This is only possible for one-time subscriptions. You can always manually create a transaction to another membership level under a different gateway (NOTE: in this case the transaction will not be recorded in the gateway). Otherwise, you will need to simply encourage the user(s) to register for the desired membership. The reason why this is not otherwise possible for recurring subscriptions is because the gateway's currently do not support changing a user's recurring profile terms once they're set.

Manually updating credit card info for a user in case of changed card - Keep in mind that if a user ever needs to update their credit card for whatever reason, they can do so from their account page if their subscription is still active, and if they have a recurring subscription. Doing so will update the card on the level of the gateway so that future charges will be processed with the new card. If for any reason you as admin need to update that info for the user you can do so by using the User Switching plugin to login as the user and do it from their account page as if you were the user.

Manually changing the gateway of user's subscription - There may not be very many situations in which you would encounter this. However, if you are hoping to do this it can only be accomplished by manually creating a transaction for them and marking it complete under an offline payment gateway. So that manual transaction would look something like this. For every other situation, you will need to encourage the users to sign up again, only under the desired gateway, if they would like to have that changed.