Memberium Keap Developer: How to Elegantly Manage Subscription Declines & Cancellations Part 1

Giving your members access to your membership and online courses via a subscription with recurring payments is a common need. As a Memberium Keap developer, I know this platform configuration gives good options when offering your memberships or online courses to your audience.

My Memberium/Keap developer advice is these tools have excellent features for handling this nicely. However, getting it to work elegantly takes some work.

In this multi part series, I am going to describe:

• How to notify your members that their payment card will expire soon so they can update it.
• How to notify members when a subscription payment gets declined so they can update their form of payment.
• How to temporarily suspend members access after a max number of payments get declined.
• How to enable members to make payments and restore their access after they get suspended.
• How to allow members to cancel their membership without customer service involvement.

Memberium Keap Developer Advice - Part 1

Handling Payment Card That Will Soon Expire and a WARNING

Configuring Keap to handle expiring cards is simple. I will show you what you need to do in a moment. Before I do so, I want to include an explanation on how to handle an special issue that can arise and include a warning about an undesirable situation that can arise if you do not handles this properly.

When a card has a valid expiration date, Keap charges the card as directed by the subscription. If the charge is good, all runs as expected. If the card gets declined, the system handles that nicely. I will explain that in the next section.

However, if the card expires, Keap no longer attempts the charge and it does NOT notify you the site owner. No billing automation trigger gets fired like it does for card declines. So when a member’s cards expires, the system generates a monthly invoice that does NOT get paid and the member continues with full access to the content they purchased, but are no longer paying.

This is just the way the system works.

In order to handle this, I tell my customers to set up a manual process to check for unpaid subscriptions monthly. It’s easy to do using the E-Commerce Reports called Receivables. At the beginning of every month, you check for any unpaid invoice from the previous month. Some of those could be declines which I will describe next, but some could be ones that could not be charged because the card expired. You can handle them by contacting the customer to get payment. You can decide to inactivate the subscription so it doesn’t continue to generate monthly unpaid invoices. You can delete any unpaid invoices that you are not expecting to get paid.

This is really important because of this unexpected Keap behavior. Keap is a shark at collecting unpaid invoices. We had a customer that wasn’t checking for these as described above. They had a customer that had about a year’s worth of unpaid invoices totalling a good amount of money. The customer then made a successful purchase of another product using a card that had a balance that could be charged. Keap upon seeing a new payment card, charged this new card for each of the unpaid invoices. This led to a very unhappy customer. They did run some refunds to reverse the situation, but it is something that happens if you don’t properly handle these.

So how do you handles expired cards?

Keap has a Billing Automation option under the E-Commerce menu. It allows you to trigger billing automation when a card is x days away from expiring. What I recommend is you send three messages to the member. One goes out 30 days before it expires. The other 15 days before it expires. The other the day before it expires. They get three messages giving them a chance to update their credit cards. When the member updates their card, any subsequent checks stop so you don’t have worry about the system sending out an expiring card message one they update their card.

In part 2 of this series, we'll be covering how to manage payment declines giving a solid user experience and maximizing collections.