It never hurts to ask. TidBITS member Carl Pohle recently wrote to me because his TidBITS membership had expired. He wanted to renew but preferred to use PayPal to avoid having another place to update his credit card number whenever it changed. I started writing back to him to apologize and explain that our Paid Memberships Pro system supports only a single payment gateway at a time, which is Stripe for us. But then I wondered if that was actually true or if I was just speaking confidently from a position of ignorance, or at least obsolete knowledge. Not that we geeks ever do that, of course!
In fact, a quick perusal of the payment gateway settings in Paid Memberships Pro showed that it does now support PayPal Express as a secondary payment gateway. After installing the necessary plug-in and configuring a few settings in PayPal, I was pleased to see a “Check Out with PayPal” option appear on our Membership Checkout page. (“Check Out with a Credit Card” continues to be the default and uses Stripe.)
A few membership renewals have used PayPal so far, and it seems to work well. You can even switch from an automatically renewing Stripe-based membership to a PayPal-based membership, though you have to change membership levels to do so—there’s no way in the interface to switch payment systems within the same level. If necessary, you could always cancel and restart the subscription manually.
However, the new PayPal integration does create a bit more work for us. If Lauri Reinhardt and I are trying to track down a payment issue, we’ll have to look in both Stripe and PayPal, and I’ll have to sweep the money out of PayPal to our bank account more regularly. All other things being equal, I encourage you to stick with credit card payments through Stripe—it consolidates reporting and payouts for us and reduces administrative overhead. But if you prefer to support TidBITS via PayPal, that’s now completely possible. Whatever you choose, we appreciate the support!
But since you mentioned reviewing I just upgraded my membership one level (with credit card) and got a new membership date, vs. picking up where the last one left off.
Maybe nit-picky but if it’s not too tricky or time consuming, might be cool to have any renewal pick up where the last one left off.
And of course, this morning I received email from PayPal complaining about how its IPN notifications were failing. I think I’ve solved that with a Cloudflare rule to let them through.
I’ve looked into the renewal date thing a few times, but it’s tricky. There are two scenarios:
Manual renewal: This is what you did. Because you don’t have an automatically renewing membership, all the system really knows is that you renewed on a certain date. Paid Memberships Pro goes with the date the transaction went through, which gives you a new date.
Automatic renewal: When your membership renews automatically, the date can remain the same each year because it’s all automated and in sync between Stripe/PayPal and PMPro.
Realistically, it’s all sort of irrelevant since almost none of the benefits that members get are highly time-sensitive. If your membership “expires,” you just wouldn’t be able to get to the page that shows the discount codes for members, you might see some different banners on the TidBITS site, and it’s conceivable that your full-text feed would stop working.
If that happened for some rectifiable reason, like a canceled credit card, it would all just pick up again where you left off when you renewed. If you were planning on letting your membership lapse for good, you’d lose access to the benefits at the very end of your lapsing year for whatever days or weeks the new renewal dates from a manually renewing membership changed by. Although that’s not ideal, I doubt anyone who would be letting a membership lapse would be super interested in availing themselves of the benefits in the last few days or weeks.
And, of course, anyone who had an issue could just write to me or Lauri and we’d make it right.
Thanks for making me research this, which has changed not that long ago as well. We need to switch from a legacy API setup with Stripe to Stripe Connect, at which point adding Apple Pay to the main payment process is just a setting switch. I’m checking with my developer to make sure there aren’t any gotchas and will enable it once he give me the go-ahead.
Doh! Lauri reminded me that Apple Pay is already supported if you’re using Safari. Apple has theoretically opened Apple Pay up to other browsers, but that doesn’t seem to be supported by Stripe yet.
