Tuesday, July 19, 2005
All PayPal Auto-Renewals Finally Cancelled: Subscribers Please Read
Posted by Jason Dunn in "UPDATE" @ 03:55 PM
This concerns subscribers, so if you've received an email from PayPal saying that your Pocket PC Thoughts subscription has been cancelled, keep reading.
When we first launched subscriber services in 2003, we had an auto-renew option that used PayPal's then-new subscription feature. When you had a subscription, it would automatically bill every year until you wanted to stop it. This seemed like a great idea at the time (don't they always), but a year after we launched subscriber services I quickly realized what a bad decision I had made. I started getting emails from people demanding to know why I had billed their account again - most seemed to have forgotten it was set up to auto-renew, and some even forgot they bought a subscription in the first place. What's worse is that PayPal didn't give me a tool to cancel the auto-renewing subscriptions, so all I could do was issue a refund then ask the person to cancel the subscription from their end. Now and then someone would file a complaint with PayPal, and their anti-fraud department would contact me asking why I charged the customer - all because the original person forgot that they signed up for a subscription in the first place. :? What made matters worse is that the auto-renewing subscriptions bypassed our subscriber activation system, meaning I had to renew those subscriptions manually. Not hard to do, but yet another thing to look after in my day.
I've been going through this for several years, and this year I decided to dig deeper and call PayPal to find out if I was missing something - turns out was...sort of. :roll: When a subscription is renewed and I clicked on the details, there was no "Cancel Subscription" button. After speaking with PayPal support today, I learnt why: the only way to cancel a subscription is to find the original subscription creation point, go into the details for it, click Cancel Subscription, then click Cancel Subscription on the next page. 8O I just finished spending the last hour doing just that - going back through almost three years of subscriber history, finding every active subscription, and cancelling it. So there should be no more auto-billing PayPal subscriptions - I did this for 2checkout last year.
What does this mean to you as a subscriber if you received an email from PayPal stating that your Pocket PC Thoughts subscription has been cancelled? Absolutely nothing - your subscription data and expiration date is stored on our server, separate from PayPal. From now on though, when your subscription comes up for renewal, you'll receive an email from our system stating as much and giving you an option to renew. If you're a lifetime subscriber, absolutely nothing changes at all - you still have your lifetime subscription.
Lastly, for those of you who got auto-renewed within the last week, I've emailed you to ask if you wanted it to auto-renew or if you wanted a refund. I'll processing those next, so thanks for your patience. Back to your regularly scheduled Pocket PC news & views!
When we first launched subscriber services in 2003, we had an auto-renew option that used PayPal's then-new subscription feature. When you had a subscription, it would automatically bill every year until you wanted to stop it. This seemed like a great idea at the time (don't they always), but a year after we launched subscriber services I quickly realized what a bad decision I had made. I started getting emails from people demanding to know why I had billed their account again - most seemed to have forgotten it was set up to auto-renew, and some even forgot they bought a subscription in the first place. What's worse is that PayPal didn't give me a tool to cancel the auto-renewing subscriptions, so all I could do was issue a refund then ask the person to cancel the subscription from their end. Now and then someone would file a complaint with PayPal, and their anti-fraud department would contact me asking why I charged the customer - all because the original person forgot that they signed up for a subscription in the first place. :? What made matters worse is that the auto-renewing subscriptions bypassed our subscriber activation system, meaning I had to renew those subscriptions manually. Not hard to do, but yet another thing to look after in my day.
I've been going through this for several years, and this year I decided to dig deeper and call PayPal to find out if I was missing something - turns out was...sort of. :roll: When a subscription is renewed and I clicked on the details, there was no "Cancel Subscription" button. After speaking with PayPal support today, I learnt why: the only way to cancel a subscription is to find the original subscription creation point, go into the details for it, click Cancel Subscription, then click Cancel Subscription on the next page. 8O I just finished spending the last hour doing just that - going back through almost three years of subscriber history, finding every active subscription, and cancelling it. So there should be no more auto-billing PayPal subscriptions - I did this for 2checkout last year.
What does this mean to you as a subscriber if you received an email from PayPal stating that your Pocket PC Thoughts subscription has been cancelled? Absolutely nothing - your subscription data and expiration date is stored on our server, separate from PayPal. From now on though, when your subscription comes up for renewal, you'll receive an email from our system stating as much and giving you an option to renew. If you're a lifetime subscriber, absolutely nothing changes at all - you still have your lifetime subscription.
Lastly, for those of you who got auto-renewed within the last week, I've emailed you to ask if you wanted it to auto-renew or if you wanted a refund. I'll processing those next, so thanks for your patience. Back to your regularly scheduled Pocket PC news & views!
