In the past, PayPal was a popular method for people to pay online for memberships and store items. As we moved these systems online, we kept PayPal active, as it also worked as a relatively painless credit card processor and worked with the Ecwid store.
When we moved to the current website using WooCommerce for the store and MemberPress for the membership management, we found PayPal didn’t integrate well with Woo, so we started using Stripe as a credit card processor, but kept PayPal active for memberships as the Stripe plugin didn’t get along well with MemberPress. Over time, that incompatibility was solved, we started having more and more issues with people trying to use their credit cards through PayPal (as some of you may already have discovered, PayPal can be extremely temperamental when it comes to updating an expired card – see below* for an explanation of what can happen here), and the treasurer asked if we could reduce the number of payment portals to make his life easier (its exports are terrible for reconciling the books).
And so, to get away from those headaches, we recently discontinued offering PayPal as an option for signups and renewals, and will soon be disconnecting it from the system entirely, so automatic renewals that are set up through PayPal won’t work anymore. What this means for you is that, when it comes time to renew your membership, you’ll need to go to your Subscriptions page (https://4wdabc.ca/members-
You can then create a new subscription:
- If you want your membership to renew automatically each year using your credit card, please visit https://4wdabc.ca/register-
now/individual-membership/ individual-membership-auto- renewing/ – it should have all your membership info pre-filled. - If you want to pay with Interac e-transfer (to interac@4wdabc.ca) or pay with credit card but renew manually each year, please use https://4wdabc.ca/register-
now/individual-membership/
If you run into any problems, please don’t hesitate to contact us at membership@4wdabc.ca, and we’ll get you sorted out. If you do this before your expiration date and find a new renewal date earlier than it should be, we can fix that as well.
*Technical background on some of the PayPal issues: when your membership is set with a “recurring subscription” through PayPal, it doesn’t send you a renewal reminder, it just pings PayPal for the payment the day before your expiration. If that fails for any reason, PayPal pings back the failure, and the system notifies you to update your CC information. Then, when you go to your account in our system and it tells you there’s a problem with your subscription, it tries to take you to your PayPal account, which often just kicks you back to our system… ugh. The membership system will try automatically three more times before simply giving up and cancelling your subscription, so if it’s reached that stage, even if you update your info with PayPal, it won’t retry again. It’s troublesome and frustrating, and it’s a big part of the reason we’re getting rid of PayPal.
