Renewal price cannot be set greater or smaller than initial price

[OptimusBain]

In a very long email interaction with IPS last June 2021, with @Stuart Silvester I described an issue that ACP payments module has with products that have an initial period set that is greater than the renewal period.

ACP allows you to set a renewal price greater or smaller than the initial period. It's a possible. The feature simply doesn't work. The possibility to add a renewal price greater/smaller than the initial price is there but it will break the renewal payments completely.

How can ACP allow us to add renewal prices smaller than the initial price if the team knows it won't work? Why is that even possible? 

I requested the functionality almost 8 months ago. Not only that, I requested that they added a warning in ACP to prevent other members from making the same mistake I made.

That warning (simple to add) if the conditions are met, has not been added. The functionality is not working, and as I said above, ACP allows you to do that.

The thing I this:

1. Invision is aware that there is a serious issue here.

2. Invision knows that the renewal price can be set greater or smaller than the initial price, but the renewals will not be charged property. It knows that it doesn't work but it has not taken care of this issue at all.

What has been done? Nothing. Not even adding a warning if the renewal price is set differently.

That's not how things should work. As I said in other posts, it seems that the payment module is abandoned. IPS is focused on badges and adding new functionalities instead of making existing ones right. It's just a fact, otherwise this issue would have been addressed as it should. However, not a single warning was added in ACP 😞 😞 needless to say, fix the issue.

Below you can find an excerpt of my interaction with Stuart Sylvester.

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Thank you for your patience whilst we looked into this.

Unfortunately, you're hitting a limit of what is currently possible. If you have an initial period set that is greater than the renewal period, Commerce is unable to set that up as a PayPal Subscription. In this situation a normal one-off payment will be processed instead.

This kind of change would be quite invasive and in my opinion a feature request as opposed to a bug. I have however gone ahead and created an internal feature request for this but I cannot guarantee when or if it would be implemented.

I'm certainly not blaming the customer, I'm agreeing that it would be useful for this to be a feature. It isn't supported right now but I have created an internal feature request so that we can look at what's involved in making a change like this. My 'invasive' comments relate to the changes that would be required to add it, it would involve a number of large changes to how Commerce deals with payments and how PayPal deals with subscriptions. We simply cannot go ahead and implement large changes like that in a minor point release. -- Changes that could reduce the stability of taking payments for other customers.

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It's difficult to understand how this functionality can still be added to the payment module, but it hasn't been addressed. At least, adding a warning if a user tried to do it.

Thanks a lot.

Edited February 8, 2022 by OptimusBain

[Marc]

As was mentioned in the message to you originally

Quote

I have however gone ahead and created an internal feature request for this but I cannot guarantee when or if it would be implemented.

While I appreciate your frustration, its something that wasnt really intended to be used in that manner. Essentially, its an oversight in that respect. Its related to the period lengths rather than the prices themselves. These can take some time to go through and decide on what we are going to do with them. At present this is still being gone through.

As you know this is not intended to work in that manner, all I can do here is reiterrate what has already been said. A warning, while stopping others from doing the same, is not going to solve your problem here.  

I understand you believe there has been nothing done to address this, however the reality here is that you havent seen anything done to address it. This is a large area of the software in which cant be simply changed without internal discussion, coding, and then implementation. This can at times involve an extended period of time to address

[OptimusBain]

23 hours ago, Marc Stridgen said:

As was mentioned in the message to you originally

While I appreciate your frustration, its something that wasnt really intended to be used in that manner. Essentially, its an oversight in that respect. Its related to the period lengths rather than the prices themselves. These can take some time to go through and decide on what we are going to do with them. At present this is still being gone through.

As you know this is not intended to work in that manner, all I can do here is reiterrate what has already been said. A warning, while stopping others from doing the same, is not going to solve your problem here.  

I understand you believe there has been nothing done to address this, however the reality here is that you havent seen anything done to address it. This is a large area of the software in which cant be simply changed without internal discussion, coding, and then implementation. This can at times involve an extended period of time to address

I also understand your point of view. But there is a fact here that hasn't been addressed:

I've reported a serious flaw in the payment process where the Commerce module will ALLOW you to set a renewal price lower/higher than the initial price. If this is done, it will break everything. Payments will go crazy. It happened to me.

You are aware of that. There is a very simple thing that can be done to prevent that from happening:

- If renewal price < or > than the initial price THEN generate ERROR and prevent the user from going further. 8 months since this serious flaw in the Commerce was reported. Was anything done? NOPE! Nothing.

That tells me a LOT about other issues that may have been reported by other members. If I extrapolate this to other issues I am not even aware of, it could be really serious.

I would love to hear a reasonable explanation of why this flaw in the process hasn't be tackled in such a simple way! I just can't understand. Commerce allows you to create such renewals, but if they are created then the whole system will break. It has nothing to do with PayPal or Stripe, because I've been taking recurrent payments with vBulletin with both payment methods for almost 10 years without as single issue. The issue has been reported, and you are telling me that nothing has been done in 8 months to WARN about this issue? I just saw a quick update to 4.6.10 today to fix a couple of things. Nothing like that has EVER been done for this SERIOUS flaw.

I am not saying that you are not doing a great job. I LOVE your software. However, if a serious flaw in the process is reported, the least thing that could be done would be to prevent that from happening again.

I don't know if this feature is going to be implemented ever. I doubt it, really. Why? Because I see that you are focused on other things, badges, interactions, your cloud service, etc. More and more features, more and more. But what about the existing ones that are flawed? Nothing.

Thanks a lot

Edited February 9, 2022 by OptimusBain

[Stuart Silvester]

With respect, I wouldn't call it a 'serious flaw' (that [imo] would be something like a customer getting products for free or being able to pay the wrong amount). The store still works properly, the only downside with this type of configuration is that automated renewals are not compatible with PayPal Subscriptions. Customers will still receive email reminders that a payment is due and they can pay that whenever they like. Again, this is something specific to PayPal subscriptions, Stripe etc can handle this type of configuration.

As noted, we still have this in our backlog to take another look at.

[OptimusBain]

3 hours ago, Stuart Silvester said:

With respect, I wouldn't call it a 'serious flaw' (that [imo] would be something like a customer getting products for free or being able to pay the wrong amount). The store still works properly, the only downside with this type of configuration is that automated renewals are not compatible with PayPal Subscriptions. Customers will still receive email reminders that a payment is due and they can pay that whenever they like. Again, this is something specific to PayPal subscriptions, Stripe etc can handle this type of configuration.

As noted, we still have this in our backlog to take another look at.

Nope it's not a problem with PayPal subscriptions. I've been using vbulletin + an external software for 9 years using this kind of payment with PayPal and then stripe; where the initial price is different to the monthly recurring payment. I have thousands of invoices to prove it.

So it's not a problem with PayPal subscriptions, it's something that it's being done wrong in the commerce module. What? No idea. But it's definitely not PayPal.

Edited February 9, 2022 by OptimusBain