Transferring Stripe subscriptions - will users be charged twice?

#1

Hi there, I’m planning on bringing Stripe subscriptions from an existing site into my new s2Member site.

From what I’ve read this should be totally doable since the payment and charges are handled within Stripe-- I just want to confirm something with maybe a slightly silly question.

If I have two sites, both with the same Stripe subscriptions associated with member accounts, will users be charged twice, once for each site the subscription is associated with?

My guess is no since the subscription is handled via Stripe and Stripe therefore should trigger the payment processing, not the sites, but I wanted to check and see if anyone had any insight.

Thanks in advance.

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#2

It all depends on how you implement things.

How do you plan to make the transition / duplication?

I don’t think s2member has native support for single subscriptions that work on 2 sites, but you can probably work things out one way or another, depending on your creativity and the size of your user base.

I personally do many things manually because I have a handful of users (to whom I am very thankful to). That means I can even use payment processors not support by s2member by promoting and demoting users manually and using the existing fields (and the custom capabilities) to hold meaningful information (or I add extra ones, as needed).

If a new user creates a new subscription using an s2member form or button, it will create one subscription.

If they use a button or form to upgrade, same.

Unless you duplicate your existing subscriptions on Stripe and you have the setting that allows for more than a subscription per user turned on, they should be blocked from having multiple ones on Stripe’s end.

On the other hand, if you want that possibility open (multiple subscriptions per user) you need to turn that feature off.

If a user creates a new subscription on one site, it won’t automatically propagate to the other via s2member routines (as far as I am aware of). There’s also a custom field with your domain name that will prevent s2member to act if that does not match. You’ll need to make modifications to be able to use those, including keeping your wordpress user database current with the latest payments, cancellations, declines etc.

:slightly_smiling_face:

#3

Gotcha, thanks for this thorough response. I might have made it confusing- I’m not looking to maintain two sites going forward, was just wondering if I could go ahead and move subscriptions over or if I should wait until we’re ready to entirely move over the entire site, or if it would cause issues for users. But I will definitely take this into consideration! It’s a good point that I should probably wait anyway since users could register on the current live site or change their membership there anyway.

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#4

If you really need to change the domain, and that’s all you’re doing (maybe the content or branding) you might need to reach out to @clavaque to see how you can do the transition plugin wise, as the plugin validates your domain for API treatment.

If it’s a large site you might need to do something to make your Stripe subscriptions compatible or to make your new website using s2member process those api requests from stripe properly (they’re usually ignored if the domains don’t match for single site licenses but I don’t know how the plugin works if you have the multi site one).

Nonetheless, I believe most problems you’ll face will be on your (back)end.

If your site is large enough and you have enough revenue I believe you can make a deal with @clavaque to develop a routine to make the plugin deal with your situation more gracefully. Otherwise, if you’re small like me, or maybe not as small but not large enough, you might have to become used to spend a bit of time, every single day, fixing things manually, one user per time… :grimacing:

#5

Two domains= not possible to have users on both. Except you find some was to auto copy users between the sites and find a way that demotions are also copied.

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