Cancelling legacy PayPal subscriptions for inactive accounts
In January 2021, we’re starting a cleanup of inactive accounts associated with a legacy PayPal subscription.
When we launched the Revive Adserver Hosted edition in December 2018, we had created a relatively simple process of subscribing and paying for subscriptions, using an online form that integrated into PayPal. The advantage was that we were able to go live with the service in a short period of time, and find out if there was sufficient interest.
As soon as it became clear that the service was in great demand, we developed a much more sophisticated and flexible subscription and payment model, based on WooCommerce, the associated WooCommerce Subscriptions add-on, and payments using credit cards by means of Stripe, a well-known payment processor.
The advantage of the new subscription model is that it offers much more flexibility. In addition, we were able to open up the service to subscribers in the European Union because we could correctly process VAT and even treat EU based business as VAT exempt if they have a valid EU VAT number. And finally, we could also send out properly formatted invoices for each payment, so that subscribers could correctly enter these in their bookkeeping.
This, along with several other smaller enhancements, resulted in a more professional and future proof system.
Once the new subscription module became available, we stopped offering the PayPal process, and we started prompting existing subscribers using PayPal to switch to the credit card subscription model. Many of them did so right away, and others followed in the next 18 months. Yet, in December 2020, a number of subscribers using the discontinued PayPal process are still around.
In order to encourage the transfer to the new payment model, we are taking a number of steps. Starting in the second half of January 2021, we will gradually cancel the PayPal subscriptions that are associated with accounts that have never been used, or that haven’t been used for over 12 months. A message to that effect will be added to the next payment confirmation for all PayPal subscribers.
When a PayPal subscription gets cancelled for this reason, the subscriber will receive a number of emails prompting them to resubscribe using a credit card, in case they want to continue having access to their ad server account. If and when they don’t act, their ad server accounts will eventually be cancelled as well. We expect all of this to be completed at the end of the first quarter of 2021.
Later in 2021, we will begin prompting the remaining legacy subscribers still using PayPal, and with an active ad server account, to switch to the new credit card payment system as well.