Recurring Payment Email Reminders

Send members a reminder email prior to when their next recurring subscription payment is made to let them know payment is processing soon.

Cancel a Member

The site administrator can manually cancel a user’s membership through the WordPress admin or the member can cancel their own membership through your site.

How Recurring Payments Work with Paid Memberships Pro

A payment gateway is essentially a digital version of the point-of-sale systems you see in brick and mortar stores. Just like accepting a credit card transaction in a physical store, a payment gateway accepts a credit card for a transaction that takes place online.

Payment gateways power the eCommerce world, allowing customers to transfer funds to businesses online in seconds. But, when it comes to membership sites, this transfer needs to happen on a recurring basis—ideally, automatically.

If you’re using Paid Memberships Pro to power your membership business, you might be wondering:

  • How are recurring payments set up?
  • How does PMPro communicate with my payment gateway?
  • Is there anything I need to do to make sure that payments are processed successfully on a recurring basis?

In this post, we’re going to address all of these questions to help you better understand how recurring payments work with Paid Memberships Pro.

Membership Billing

The Membership Billing page offers a feature for members to change or update the payment method associated with a specific subscription.

By including the required shortcode or block, the page dynamically loads the form and payment gateway fields tailored to the subscription the user selected from their Membership Account.

Membership Levels

The Memberships > Settings > Level page in the WordPress admin allows you to create and edit the Membership Levels for your membership site.

Notify Members of Upcoming Recurring Payment / Automatic Renewal for Membership

Our Recurring Payment Email Reminder Add On allows you to notify members that their membership renewal payment is processing soon. This recipe shows you how to use the pmpro_upcoming_recurring_payment_reminder filter to modify when that notification is sent.

By default, the Add On sends a notification 7 days prior to a member’s recurring payment date. In the example below, we modify that default to send the notification 14 days (or two weeks) prior to renewal. Annual plans may want to adjust this to 30 days or another value that best fits the needs of your membership program.

Membership Level Setup

In the WordPress admin, navigate to Memberships > Settings and select Levels. From here you can create a new level or edit existing levels.

Modifying Payment Subscriptions in PayPal

PayPal is one of the most popular payment gateways that membership businesses use to process recurring subscription payments. But what happens when you want to make changes to user subscriptions?

If you use Paid Memberships Pro to run your membership site, everything can be edited directly from the merchant’s PayPal account. This means that administrators can change a subscription’s billing amount or next payment date without having to make any changes in Paid Memberships Pro.

You might want to modify payment subscriptions in PayPal in order to do things like:

  • Let members pause their subscriptions
  • Give discounts to your members
  • Upgrade or downgrade subscriptions
  • Change the price for individual members
  • Fix payment subscriptions for anyone who may have paid the wrong price at the checkout

If you run a Paid Memberships Pro membership site using PayPal to accept recurring payments, read on to learn how to modify payment subscription directly in PayPal.

Uninstall PMPro

If you decide to uninstall and remove Paid Memberships Pro, here are some important facts to keep in mind: This update is permanent and cannot be reversed. The PMPro support team can provide guidance to help you rebuild your membership site if you mistakenly delete your data, but in most cases this is impossible to (more…)

iDevAffiliate

iDevAffiliate offers native support for Paid Memberships Pro checking, including coupon code commissioning, recurring commissions during the billing cycle for the customer and automatic completion of the commissioning process when the subscription is cancelled.

PMPro_Membership_Level Class

The PMPro_Membership_Level class holds information about a particular PMPro membership level and can be used to create, update, delete, or get information about membership levels.

Reports

Four basic reports are included in your Paid Memberships Pro “Memberships” admin area. These reports highlight Sales and Revenue, Signups and Cancellations, Active Members by Level, as well as data for Member Visits, Views and Logins.

When to Set Up Recurring Billing and Expirations for Memberships

With Paid Memberships Pro, you can set up membership levels with many different pricing structures. We cover these in our guide on how to price a membership site and the 10 most popular membership pricing models.

One error we see from time to time is that the admin incorrectly sets a recurring payment and an expiration date on their membership levels. While the system can handle this setup, it is not the recommend way to set up a recurring subscription.

Continue reading this guide to understand the specific cases where you would want to set up an expiration date on a recurring membership. For most sites where members pay on a recurring basis, the level’s expiration date should not be set.

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PayPal

Paid Memberships Pro is a PayPal Partner and integrates with several PayPal payment processing options. Adding PayPal as an additional payment option to your checkout page gives your customers a faster way to pay. More payment options means more sales.

Paid Memberships Pro PDF Invoices

Paid Memberships Pro PDF Invoices allows you to automatically generate PDF invoices for Paid Memberships Pro orders and send them directly on successful checkouts.

Proration

Simple proration for membership upgrades and downgrades to adjust initial payment at membership checkout and maintain a member’s payment date if applicable.

How to Set Up Paid Memberships Pro

This guide walks you through installing and configuring Paid Memberships Pro for your WordPress site. If you follow all of the advice and instructions in this document, your final site will include the following: Topics Covered in the Guide