Hello, We currently are using netbilling for our recurring subscriptions... but now are planning on swapping over to USAepay as originally intended. When I do this, what will happen with the existing recurring subscriptions? Will their next charge seamlessly go through USAepay? or will something break along the way? Just would like to know before I turn on USAepay and turn off netbilling! Thanks!
Hi Designlacky, I didn't realize USAepay was supported by the payment plugins - it doesn't seem to be listed. Do you intend to use the epayment form/service supported by usaepay?
Just got the plugin last week from Alex so it's new, and are excited to use it after using netbilling until it was done. Just don't want to mess up our current subscribers in the process of switching over. I, myself, am not too familiar with what USAepay offers. I'm just helping get amember setup for our recurring subscriptions.
I can't answer that question definitively BUT my gut feel is that existing customers will not work with your new payment processor, without some additional action being taken. In THEORY (and LEGALLY) is that your existing customers have a "contract" with you and your OLD payment processor to pay $x per month thru the OLD payment processor ONLY, so adding a new payment processor does not constitute a change in the "contract". Its in a way "SIMILAR" to having a monthly direct bank debit set up between your customers bank (Bank C) and your bank (Bank A) then you go and change to Bank B. That alone will not create a new direct debit from Bank C to Bank B. I can't say whether amember will seamlessly convert your old customers or not ..... but it legally shouldn't do it. The reason being, that your NEW payment processor really has no way of knowing if there ever was an "agreement" between your customer and your OLD payment processor company. Having said all that if you have credit card details stored in amember IT MIGHT work without additional steps being taken.
I've put in a ticket 2 days ago regarding this and haven't heard anything back. So I'll add another question in here that maybe someone here can assist me with. Since I cannot find out if it will seemlessly go from one to another, I was planning on testing it. Created a 1 day recurring product, and signed up with a test CC from Netbilling. I had the USAepay plugin activated at the time but had it set so subscription to that product was netbilling only, but for some reason the signup kept erroring until I turned off the usaepay plugin. Once that plugin was deactivated, error went away. Completed my signup. Now. I wanted to go into that test subscription and change my CC info to my test card number from USAepay... turn off the netbilling plugin... turn on the USAepay plugin. Watch to see what happens when rebill occurs. If it goes thru rebill it means a seemless switch would work...right? My questions to him were: 1) As long as no current subscribers are being rebilling during my testing, can I safely turn off netbilling plugin and turn on USAepay to test? If I find a problem can I turn netbilling plugin back on and it'll act like nothing happened when current subscribers are eventually rebilled? 2) Will the test above give me the answer I'm seeking regarding how members will be processed if I fully switch to usaepay? Thank you in advance to anyone who can offer assistance or information
If USAepay payment system is implemented so that credit card info is stored in amember database then in theory with some customization it could probably be made to work, but I doubt without any mods it will work. When amember tries to rebill its going to query the database for expired memberships and try to rebill using the payment processor that is associated with the membership. So first of all I suspect it will not try to even rebill if you have the plugin for netbilling disabled. You could try and update the amember database so that the payment system is changed form Netbilling to USAepay this would get around this problem but might cause other problems. An alternative is if the USAepay plugin has a function similiar to netbilling_rebill (i.e. usaepay_rebill) then you could disable netbilling, enable usaepay plugin and modify the usaepay_rebill function to call $db->get_expired_payments(..., 'netbilling') and process those payments initially purchased using netbilling and rebill using usaepay, and then call $db->get_expired_payments(..., 'usaepay') and process those rebills that were done initially thru usaepay. If the plugins are similiar and store same information in database then that might be all you have to do. In general if both Netbilling and USAepay work in similiar fashion where credit card information is stored on your server in Amember database then I would think with some mods you could make it work. This assumes that amember is the one doing rebilling via cron versus your payment processor doing the rebill automatically and notifying you after the fact. The legal question I would ask is if the rebilling contract entered with subscriber is between you and the subscriber, or between the subscriber and payment processor, or some combination of them both. This I don't know the answer to Jimmy