Scheduled Shopping Cart and License Manager Upgrades

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#1 Tue, 04/26/2016 - 03:16
Joe
Joe's picture

Scheduled Shopping Cart and License Manager Upgrades

Howdy all,

Just a heads up that tomorrow throughout the day I'll be updating several components of our shopping cart and license manager. As most folks know, we've had significant pains with the new site (new and exciting problems completely different from the many annoying problems we had with the old Drupal 6 site and cart). I've been working on our devel site on a number of issues related to payments, subscription billing, license expiration and renewal, and reseller discounts on recurring subscription orders. The good news is that I have now worked out most of the major issues with the help of one of the smart folks at The Commerce Guys (the folks who develop Drupal Commerce).

User facing changes that will be happening over the next few days include, but are not limited to:

  1. We will be switching payment processing from Braintree to Stripe. Because we don't store any payment information on our systems, and instead store it in the Braintree vault, this will, unfortunately, require everyone with recurring subscriptions to update their payment data. We'll send out an email, and make another news post, when this change takes effect. The positive side effect of this is that you'll be able to update, delete, and add card information to our Stripe vault. Note that we will continue to not store any payment information on our servers; even for recurring monthly payments, it will be stored with our payment processor.
  2. Monthly licenses will actually recur automatically, and will be billed every month, with no human intervention. We've got a couple of bugs in the current system preventing that from happening automatically, and so we're processing recurring orders manually on a somewhat erratic schedule. We've also got bugs preventing accurate reporting of which orders have recurred and which have not...so, things on the backend are really ugly and confusing. This has, more than we'd like, caused confusion for customers who see payments happening when they didn't expect them. We thought this was working when we deployed the site, but it was only recurring once, and many payments fail without error (and some succeed without notice); this is the reason for switching from Braintree. The implementation for Drupal Commerce is very incomplete and buggy, while Stripe is much more complete, and seemingly less buggy.
  3. Licenses will automatically expire when a payment cannot be processed. I'm working on a dunning system to email when payments fail, which will hopefully roll out this week, as well. Until the automated system rolls out, we'll manually let you know when payments can't be processed. So, as always, make sure your email address for your account is correct.
  4. Reseller/quantity discounts on recurring orders will be functional (we've manually been applying them when we spot reseller recurring orders, but bugs in the discount+billing system prevented them from being applied automatically).
  5. A variety of other small bugfixes with the shopping and license experience.

Some stuff that'll take a little longer but will finally be happening within a week or two (the bugs in the system have prevented me from trying to work on much else):

  1. Self-cancellation of license subscriptions. That'll come ASAP after the bug fixes go in. In the meantime continue to file tickets to cancel your subscriptions. We'll happily take care of those for you within a few hours, and issue refunds for licenses under 45 days old (as always).
  2. Coupons (or some method of granting discounts to our pre-price change customers). We've planned from the launch of the new site to issue coupons for our old customers, who've been around since before the price restructuring; that hasn't changed. Everybody with expiring licenses has received a few extra expiration date bumps (or will, as your licenses approach expiry), so there have been some extra bonuses along the way.
  3. Renewals of old licenses, and upgrades/downgrades without having to get us involved. (Again, we're happy to handle those changes manually, but, we know it's nicer when it's instant and handled by clicking a button.)

There will be some down time during the day, and there will be some weirdness with the cart and licenses while I sort out the move to Stripe and the upgrade of the billing module. I'll also be resetting the billing cycle on all of the licenses that have gotten "stuck" in a non-recurring state, so if you've got licenses that haven't been billed on schedule this month, it'll likely bill in the next couple days.

Thanks for your patience as we sort these things out.

Cheers,

Joe

Tue, 05/03/2016 - 03:13
pixel_paul
pixel_paul's picture

Hi Joe,

sounds great. How do we upgrade licenses at the moment?

Thanks,

Paul

Tue, 05/03/2016 - 22:36
andreychek

At the moment, the way to upgrade is to purchase the upgrade, then create a new suppport request notifying us that you purchased the upgrade. We'll then press a few buttons and make it happen.

Thanks!

-Eric

Mon, 05/09/2016 - 08:55 (Reply to #3)
pixel_paul
pixel_paul's picture

Hi Eric,

For the life of me, I can't see the option to upgrade anywhere - all I can see is the option to Buy -> Cloudmin -> 50 licenses.

The is no option in Account -> Licenses.

Thanks,

Paul

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