FAQ

PHP 5.6 as a minimum

As PHP 5.5 has reach end of life in July 2016 the minimum supported version of PHP is PHP 5.6.

Option One: Ask Your Host

Your web host should be able to tell what version of PHP is running on the server.

Option Two: Find Out Yourself

Also you can find out yourself as follows:

1) Create a new file phpversion.php

2) Add a single line of code: <?php echo phpversion(); ?>

3) Upload the file to the your web site

4) View the file in a browser at http://www.yoursite.com/phpversion.php

5) Once you have the version number you may delete the phpversion.php file from your web site.

There is usually no impact of changing a person’s email address. The full answer depends on whether you collect the person’s email address during ordering.

Let’s consider the 2 main options:

Option A: When Using An Order Form Or Shopping Cart

Orders are matched to a Infusionsoft contact and hence the email address can be changed independently. There will not be any issue with payments on existing orders or new orders.

It is normal practice to set up SubscriptionBoss using either you own self hosted order form or an Infusionsoft order form or shopping cart which collects the email and name before sending the member to PayPal to pay. This means they are set up using their preferred email address and not their PayPal email address.

Option B – When Using A Buy Button With No Form

SubscriptionBoss only uses the PayPal email address and name if you do not collect their details on an order form or shopping cart. This means you have a buy button and nothing else.

The only issue with changing an email could arise was if:

1) You do not collect their details on the order form
2) A member buys with PayPal email address [email protected] and the contact is set up with [email protected]
3) At some point later you change their email address in Infusionsoft to [email protected]
4) Later they make a second purchase using PayPal email [email protected] using just a buy button. This would create new contact for [email protected]

You could get around this by passing in their email address in a hidden field if the person was logged in to a membership site. But if they were on a public site they would present as a new user and hence you would need to move the order manually on to the other account

Therefore this is just one of many reasons why it is better to use an order form/shopping cart so the buyer can use an email address other than their PayPal address.

Question:

I can login to the /members/wp-login.php but when I click on the support forum, it looks like I’m not logged in. It recognizes me as guest.

Answer:

The support forum is implemented as a plugin so if you can log in to WordPress you are also logged into the forum.

It is most likely a caching issue in your browser. Your browser is remembering you once tried to access the forum when not logged in and is just serving that page
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​If you login first at http://www.subscriptionboss.com/members/wp-login.php BEFORE visiting the forum this guest access will not happen
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​Also easy tip to break the cache (other than clearing all your browsing history) is to add ?x=something to the URL
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​So try http://www.subscriptionboss.com/members/forum/support/?x=y where x or y can be anything – this is a new page to the browser and hence it will access the web server and hence show you the logged-in version of the page or not the version from the cache

Question:

I get a lot of “Payment skipped” emails, looking in Subscription Boss I see customers who have Notifications of Payment skipped, payment failed, payment skipped etc, can you tell me exactly what causes a payment to be SKIPPED and why?

Answer:

Payment Failures

PayPal tries to take payment 3 times; the first time is says Payment Skipped; 5 days later it tries again and if it fails it is another Payment Skipped; then, after a further 5 days, it tries a third and final time, and if this fails then the message is Payment Failed. – for more see What happens on a PayPal payment failure?

Why Does Payment Fail?

PayPal does not indicate the reason for failure. It can be one of the following

• there are insufficient funds in the PayPal account
• there are insufficient funds in the bank account that backs the PayPal account
• the credit card that funds the PayPal account has expired

In my experience it is typically the third scenario and after the member is alerted of the issue , they add a new card to their PayPal account the next payment attempt succeeds.

Setting Up Payment Failure Handling

The standard approach is to set up Infusionsoft action sets to send out emails after each failure – see screenshot and payment failure handling instructions here.

It is common practice to cancel their subscription if they do not resolve the payment issue after 3 emails. However, other clients using membership software may give limited or no access after the first or second failure – it really depends on how you want to set up the IS action sets to handle this.

What If You Want To Allow Them Longer Than A Month To Pay?

If you want to allow your member to go into more than 1 month in arrears then PayPal has an option to allow the debt to be carried through to the next month and then PayPal will try and collect 2 months money at the same time – for more on this see and the section called Automatically Bill Outstanding Amount

Paid Service Available

It you are proficient at IS it is pretty easy to set this up yourself. However, as a time saving measure, I often help people set up their PayPal payment handling by “doing the plumbing” of the creating the Action Sets, tags and campaign to handle the payment failure processing. This typically takes 30 to 60 minutes and is charged at $180 per hour. This leaves the client the job of tweaking the content of the emails to get the right tone of language for their user base.

The Infusionsoft implementation for PayPal Subscriptions requires PayPal “Reference Transactions” which allows the vendor to take any amount of money at any time from an buyer’s account (up to USD10,000 per transaction).
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​There are a couple of major problems with this:
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​1) PayPal don’t grant the Reference Transactions capability without a lot of scrutiny of the applicant. There is a lengthy compliance process that considers the age of the account, the reputation, the niche, the refund rate, the value of the customer to PayPal and in what country it is operating.. So the majority of PayPal vendors are not actually eligible for this feature
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​2) Buyers may not want to use PayPal in this way as it gives up control over their PayPal account. One of reasons precisely why users choose PayPal is because they can control every new agreement. By buying via a reference transaction they need to give up that control.
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​SubscriptionBoss uses normal PayPal Recurring Payments and hence it is available to all Business and Premium PayPal users.
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Other Advantages Of SubscriptionBoss

SubscriptionBoss has better support for payment failures, cancellation and refunds​.

It now has multi-currency support which can save up to 4% of sales on PayPal FX fees (and the buyer can save up to 4% as well too)
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​Support for Stripe, 2Checkout and Braintree Payments is in the pipeline.

After the Infusionsoft Spring 2014 update the PayPal payment option may disappear from your order forms.

There are 2 ways to put it back. You will need to use the second method if you are using a PayPal certificate instead of a PayPal signature for your Express Checkout API.

• Set up PayPal Express Checkout in Infusionsoft
• Enable addition of PayPal option on SubscriptionBoss

Setting Up PayPal Express Checkout On Infusionsoft

This is just a matter of fetching your PayPal API username, password and signature and saving them under E-commerce Setup > Payment Types

Enabling The PayPal Button On SubscriptionBoss

Go to SubscriptionBoss Settings and in the Infusionsoft Form Settings section click the Add PayPal checkbox then Save Settings