Solved... kind of - PayPal Transaction ID entered on wrong member record

I’m finding a very serious issue with PayPal transaction IDs being entered on the wrong member record. We have over 17k member records and many are coming up for renewal. This is a new installation and everything appeared to be imported correctly through the s2Member importer. I do have logs enabled, but don’t know exactly what to be looking for. I’m going through all the PayPal emails to identify the correct record and enter the correct transaction ID as needed. The incorrect record which is receiving the trans ID is not having EOT updated, nor is the Custom Value. I have set all the forms, new paid member, renew member, and free subscriber forms to have Custom Values so I an see where and how much each paid (amount selected from a popup). Any help with this would be greatly appreciated. I have been using s2Member for nearly 10 years with two clubs and had my customer with this issue get their own account.

I took a quick look at the debug log and can’t seem to find a link to the member record, at least nothing obvious. This appears to only be happening with renewals, but it looks like it may be most of them recently. Any help connecting log to record would be helpful.

Well, this is getting weirder. When I imported records, I use a flag “import” to go into the Paid Subscr. ID field. Guess what. With the word import there the transaction gets posted to another member record… one with a 2 digit WordPress ID. I have over 13K records with the work import… If this is the case, this is a bug in s2Member.

There are two importers in s2member-pro:


They have different formats and don’t play together well so a file exported using the basic importer/exporter should not be imported using the advanced importer/exporter and vice-versa.

Just checking that you are using a format aligned to the correct importer / exporter.

Assuming you are…

I found out the hard way that the basic importer uses the email address as the unique record key rather than the User ID. Check to make sure there are not duplicate or illegal email addresses in your import file (you did not say where you got the user file that you are importing).

If you have a spreadsheet like excel you can just sort on email address and add a formula in the column next to it to flag the duplicates and illegal characters and sum the check column so you can see if there are any issues at a glance (17K is a big file).

I do know about the Advanced Import, however that is not the problem I’m having. From the beginning of the transfer to s2Member, I added a tag (“import”) to go into the PayPal Transaction ID field. This was before any PP transactions occurred. New members did not have any problem. Those renewing were having a problem and removing the word “import” from that field resolved the issue. However, I tried this on another s2Member site I designed and it did not fail. So, there is more to this story and I have no suspects at this time, but since I took over the site design when I was hired to install and transfer to s2Member there are a ton of plugins and a theme I’ve not worked with. I will be testing this on a test site to resolve the complexity of this mess. I’m glad I have a few other sites which do not have this issue.

@jrietz - It sounds like you migrated a site but you still didn’t say where you got the import file from. My point was if you exported from the old site and imported it to the new site with the exporter / importer not matched (standard or advanced) then weird things would happen. You also did not explain why you put ‘import’ in the PayPal Transaction ID field. I’m not sure if you are looking for advice or just raising a potential issue though what that issue is I am unsure because I would never have thought to put the word ‘import’ in the PayPal Transaction ID field.

The club used Access as their main resource (11k record), 15 spreadsheets, and 3 contact lists. It was a mess to say the least. I merged everything (after doing a lot of tweaking) into a FileMake Pro database to validate and get ready for importing using the s2Member format. I’ve been working with databases for over 30 years and have grown accustom to leaving audit trails to know where things came from. I had also left tags in the comment field.

Initially, I thought this may have been a s2Member issue, but now know it is not but a complex issue with other players. Since everything seems to be working no, finding the combination is not on the front burner at this time but I will report my finding as soon as I can.

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Cheers @jrietz - sounds like you have this well in hand :slight_smile: