No longer getting "Subscription Payment Failed" messages

[Xtempore]

Credit cards expire, or sometimes need to be changed for a variety of reasons, and this seems to really mess up Subscriptions in PayPal.

That's been a problem for while, but now it seems to have gotten even worse. 

It used to be that when a payment failed we would get an email telling us which subscription, and when PayPal will try again.  If it failed again a few days later, another email, and if it failed a third time then the subscription would be cancelled.

For some reason we no longer receive these emails, instead we just get an email saying that the subscription has been cancelled, and often a panicked call from a customer who can no longer access their account.

This is a serious problem.  It causes problems for the customer, and wastes a lot of our time too.  It also costs us money because even though the customers sign up for a new subscription, we've lost 9 or 10 days of revenue in the meantime.  It's not the customers fault so we don't charge them.  The fault, as far as I can tell, lies with PayPal.

Ultimately, I'd like PayPal to fix the bug with the Subscriptions so that a change to credit card details doesn't kill off the subscription.  It is clearly a bug, because without fail the customers who've had their subscriptions cancelled can sign up for a new one without making any changes in PayPal.

But it may be wishful thinking to think PayPal are going to fix it.  At the very least though I would like to have the "Subscription Payment Failed" emails working again, so that I can catch these issues before they drag out for a week or two of lost revenue.

Any suggestions gratefully received.

[surplusdealdude]

It's not the customers fault so we don't charge them.

?????

WTF?

The subscription payment wouldn't fail if the customer kept their account up to date.

There's a certain amount of personal responsibility needed here.

[Xtempore]

As far as we can tell in most cases it has not been the customer's fault.

The problem seems to occur when even when they have correctly updated their details.  As well as subscriptions the same customers sometimes make one off purchases, and in a recent case the customer used their account to make a purchase, and yet even so the subscription payment still failed the following day.

That seems pretty definitive to me.  In other instances I am just reliant on what they are telling me, but our customers are very reliant upon our system, and are usually pretty panicked by the thought that their subscription might get cancelled.  I've never told them in advance that we just absorb the cost of the missed days, so I doubt very much that they are trying to deliberately mislead me.

I've since received a response from PayPal, stating that the lack of email notifications is due to "technical issues with the PayPal system".

[surplusdealdude]

That's paypal's way of saying, "We don't know."

Frankly, I can't see how making a purchase 1 day could cause a failure the next day.

However, this sounds like something you might have to phone Paypal about.  See if they can transfer you to the technical people - they should at least be made aware of the issue ( and I don't trust the drones at CS to do that)

Paypal's number comes up when you click on 'contact us'.

[Xtempore]

Thanks for the advice.    I think I was unclear, so let me clarify what I was saying.

We had a client whose subscription payment failed.  We contacted them, and found out they had updated their credit card details (this is always how it starts). 

A couple of days later the retry also failed, so we asked them to check their details once again,  They did this and confirmed that the old credit card had been removed, and the new details were correct.

To make sure everything was working correctly, they made a purchase from us (some SMS credits).  We thought everything must be right otherwise this would have failed, but the next day when PayPal retried the subscription payment (the 3rd attempt), it failed, and the customer's account was cancelled.

The customer had to resubscribe, and was able to do this without having to make any changes in PayPal.

As far as I can tell, a subscription seems to become inextricably tied to the credit card that was present at the time the subscription starts, and updating it in the account does NOT update it for the subscription.

[surplusdealdude]

That sounds logical.

I wouldn't hold your breath waiting for Paypal to fix this.

Perhaps a good workaround is to post a notice for all of your subscribers to be careful of this?

[Xtempore]

Yep, good idea.

[SODdancer]

We are having the same problem. We stopped getting the "Failed" emails around the middle of May. Causes us a bunch of extra time and lost revenue also.

Did you ever get this resolved?

[Xtempore]

It *may* have been resolved.  We have recently started getting the emails again, but I'm not sure whether it is consistent.

It also doesn't resolve the problem of why these payment failures are happening.  Initially it may be because the credit card has expired etc, but even after the details are corrected in PayPal the subscription payments still fail.

It's very frustrating.  I've had some clients who just don't want to use PayPal, and I give them a big speech about how secure and efficient it is, etc.  It then becomes really embarrassing to have to say, "Yeah, I know you fixed up your credit card details, but PayPal has a bug and doesn't recognise it properly".

It looks bad for me, and bad for PayPal.  I really don't understand why they haven't fixed this.

[Xtempore]

As a result of ongoing problems because of PayPal's lame subscription system I had resorted to monitoring all my subscriptions manually.

In part this involved logging in to PayPal and going to the Recurring Payments Dashboard to check any subscription payments that appeared to be overdue.

Today, I tried to do this, but when going into the dashboard it showed NOTHING!  There should be dozens of subscriptions listed there.

I am just praying that this is just a display problem, and not an indication that the subscriptions have all been deleted.

Can you imagine that??!!   I would have to contact all those customers, and ask them to resubscribe.

To be honest I probably wouldn't.  If those subscriptions are really gone it'd be the last straw.  I would be looking for a new payment system.