The issue: when someone let’s a subscription (product subscription or regular subscription) expire, they will later not be able to buy it again, because the invoice on file prevents a new subscription. But the existing subscription also cannot be renewed because the invoice has expired. This can only be solved by intervention from an admin (manually finding and deleting these invoices), but there might be hundreds of those and it would require a constant monitoring of expired invoices.
The solution: The check that prevents a new subscription with an invoice on file should be removed or adjusted. Someone who doesn’t have a subscription anymore, because subscription and invoice have expired, must be treated like anyone who never had a subscription. Both groups should see exactly the same offers because their status in relation to these subscriptions is the same.
Why it matters: People run into this problem all the time and it’s not just an inconvenience, it it costing them money, because people who would want to pay cannot pay and probably just give up. Here are just a few examples from the recent days (and I have observed this and commented on it for years):
Subscription buttons don't show up. (yesterday)
Subscriptions Bug (yesterday)
invoice has expired but member cannot renew (7 days ago)
The development time to fix this is probably much cheaper than having IPS support deal with this issue for years, constantly identifying the issue and guiding people through the process of the possible work-arounds. So it would be a win-win situation to finally fix this. 😉