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WooCommerce Subscriptions

by Woo
Let customers subscribe to your products or services and pay on a weekly, monthly or annual basis.

Make subscriptions fully compatible with SEPA

Although your Stripe extension allows for SEPA to be offered, the subscription extension itself is not fully compatible with such payments, or any payments that take multiple days to process/be confirmed.

On purchase the subscription goes into pending until the payment is confirmed, which is of course frustrating if a user is expecting access to a digital product, though I understand why it is done.

The real problem arises when a recurring payment is processed, as the payment confirmation doesnt come through straight away. The status of the subscription goes back into pending, resulting in the customer losing access to their subscription product or even worse a whole member area if the two are linked. This confuses the customer as they have lost access although they have not cancelled their subscription.

I believe this is a general problem with any recurring payments that can not be immediately confirmed. We have now accepted over 50 subscriptions that use SEPA and our customers lose access to the subscription member area for 3-4 days every month.

The solution I see is that for SEPA payments, the recurring fee should be deducted 4-5 days before the subscription espires. If the payment doesnt go through before the subscription expiry date, only then should it go into pending. Or if this is intended to go into pending with subscriptions, then SEPA payments should be automatically blocked for recurring payments like Giropay and others.

I honestly believe it should be fully compatible though, since SEPA covers a 700 million+ market.

Author

Current Status

Open

Last updated: November 9, 2020

7 comments

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  1. John Coy says:

    Subscription with SEPA can be complex as it requires the system to put the Subscription `On Hold` while it awaits payment confirmation from SEPA, which can take anywhere from 1-2 days to 1-2 weeks. During that time the Subscription holders may lose access to the Subscription. To resolve this, an order autocomplete plugin is needed, such as the **WooCommerce Order Status Control** plugin. This can be utilized to complete those orders while they await confirmation, so the subscribers do not suffer any loss of access. By default, the next payment date for a subscription renewal is determined by when the last successful payment was completed. If you’d like to preserve the original billing date regardless of when the successful payment posts, you could use this free mini-plugin: https://github.com/Prospress/woocommerce-subscriptions-preserve-billing-schedule

  2. Aviva for IM says:

    Does Woocommerce subscription already have a good solution for this issue? If not, where can I find more information how to create the workaround with creating an earlier payment date for SEPA renewals.? Thanks.

  3. goldmountainsmultimedia says:

    Please integrate this feature! It’s very important.

  4. danielvandekamp9c24791323 says:

    We have the same problem for thousands of subscribers. We’ve had to build custom code which set the status to complete even thought the payment had not been processed by our PSP yet. That worked kinda okay, unless people ordered their bank to pull back the SEPA payment, cause the status would then be set back to “processing” which then would trigger the automatic change to complete for the second time.
    This is a very big problem for us. We have now again written custom code to set the payment date back one week before the renewal date. But I totally agree that this should be build in to the plugin.

  5. Gijs says:

    Yes agree, same challenge herre. Did you guys manage to find a solution?

  6. Fabian says:

    Huge problem for us and everybody in the German market for sure! I cannot stress how much a solution would help us here!

  7. Nico Csanyi says:

    Hey Ben, I have the same problem! Any chance you have found a fix for this?

    Regards
    Nico

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