Old members re-joining issue

#1

Hi, I have a common issue regarding old members re-joing my site.

When they initially join they get Level#1 access

when they cancel their subscriptions they are demoted to ‘subscriber’

Now whenever any of theses past members decide to join again, the registration page (after Paypal payment) tells them that their email address is already being used (because they are still on the system as a subscriber)

I then have to manually add the Paypal subscription number and change their restriction to Level#1 again.

So my question is, how can we make this automated so that when an old member re-joins, there old account is automatically upgraded or they can at least see a message on the ‘registration’ page to inform them what to do if they are re-joining?

regards

Jason

#2

Please use the search facility. This has been asked and answered before.

#3

Thanks, not very helpful but I have searched and can’t find anything, obviously Ive go to search for however the previous post described it. If you could point me in the direction that would be appreciated!

thanks

#4

Actually this has been answered before - but the answer is not straight forward. You need the people to sign in before checking out - and then use an upgrade form.

However many people will NOT login beforehand. There should be a way to identify that the same email has been used before for Account X - and then take action ABC and NOT tell the user that he cannot use the email address.

Sadly such intelligent IF/THEN behaviour does not exist in s2member to my knowledge - you’ll face much more similar problems if things are not handled exactly the way s2member devs thought they would be handled many many years ago.

Yes there may be websites where it would be better not to have this behaviour - but in s2member there is no option or IF/THEN structure to properly handle this - which means you wait for the customer to complain (hopefully not at paypal or direct credit card chargeback) - and then fix it manually. I face this problem every few days. And well users will react very differently here - some pay again then ask you to refund the first transaction (pretty common), some send you an email (for my websites that’s the most common), some don’t do anything but are pissed off and you lose them as a customer (pretty common), some just pay another time logged in and don’t mind paying twice knowing it’s their error (very few but happens).

#5

Thanks for the explanation. I did not have the courage to investigate about this. I have to take a look now at the upgrade forms.

#6

@jasdfgh - Jason - We had to write a bit of custom code to do this. We first ask for their email address before letting them do anything. We check to see if they are a subscriber, we renew them, otherwise we send them to registration.

@raamdev - Sure many would love to see something like this considered as an enhancement to s2member.

#7

I have similar problem and would be good to have a solution to this.
And i will add this as a FAQ question with answer on my site so they know.

#8

Forgot to add that we do not require them to login to renew.