Cancellations and Refunds
Cancellation Of Ongoing Subscription
DAP employs a very unique “Pay As You Go” model.
It’s very similar to the “Pay As You Go” model used by cell phone companies.
You pay first, then new content (or “cell phone minutes” in the mobile world) gets released to you. You stop paying, you don’t get new content (minutes).
So let’s say a member (Joe Customer) joined your membership site this month, and this is January. So he’s on Month #1 in January.
When he first signs up (free or paid trial, or actual 1st month’s subscription), then his start and end dates in DAP on your site look like this:
Start date: Jan 1, 2009
End date: Jan 31, 2009
(Of course, DAP uses actual dates like “01/01/2009”, but “Jan 1, 2009” is easier to read for most people, especially an international audience – so using the above date format just for the purposes of this post).
Then, let’s say, his February subscription payment comes in. Now DAP “extends” his access to your content by a month. So now the dates look like this:
Start date: Jan 1, 2009
End date: Feb 28, 2009
Now your member Joe has access to all content from Jan 1 to Feb 28 (meaning, about 60 days worth of “dripped content”).
Then end of February, he decides to cancel his membership for whatever reason (or his credit card gets declined or rejected while processing payment for Feb). So no payment comes in for March.
Now because no payment came in, DAP doesn’t really do anything about his access dates. So they continue to stay at:
Start date: Jan 1, 2009
End date: Feb 28, 2009
So any content that you have configured to be dripped on, say, Day #61 (which is Month #3), won’t be available to Joe, even though he continues to remain an “Active” member within DAP, and continues to get your autoresponder and br0adcast emails, and even continues to have access to your affiliate program and continues to earn commissions.
Actually, it gets even better – just because Joe’s end date expired, he basically now has NO access to ANY content on your web site (even Month #1’s content).
[Note: Just so you know, DAP does have a feature to enable “Access to Previously Paid-for Content”. Keep reading for details.]Now all Joe has lost is just the “access to the content”.
So let’s say you exchange emails with him, ask him why he wanted to cancel, and try to convince him to come back (or get him to use a new, valid credit card).
Now remember that Joe is still at the end of February’s content (Month #2). So whenever the next payment comes in (be it in March, April, or 1 year later), Joe now gets access only to the 3rd month’s content, and not, say, the 10th month content.
So even though it is now say, May, because Joe’s next payment came in just now, his access dates now look like this:
Start date: Jan 1, 2009
End date: March 31, 2009
So that’s how DAP takes care of your content and makes sure that when members cancel or their payment doesn’t come in for whatever reason, your content cannot be accessed by unauthorized users.
But let’s say you want to be really fair and look like a “generous, honest” guy to your members. In that case, you want to make sure that if someone cancels their subscription 6 months after being with you, you don’t want to ‘screw’ them just because they stopped paying you. Who knows, they’ll probably come back if you keep showing to them what kind of content you’re building. Or they may buy your other products.
So now you want to make sure that they get access to the last 6 months worth of content, for which they have actually paid for.
There is a Configuration element in DAP where you can just turn this feature on, and members can instantly start access all “Previously Paid-for Content”.
So that’s how DAP puts a unique twist on cancellations.
Cancellation Of Trial
There is a small twist to the cancellation of a free or paid “Trial”. Consider the following example:
- User made the purchase on 2011-09-16.
- Because you have set it up as a 14-day trial, User gets 14 days of access.
So at this time the user’s access start date = 2011-09-16 and user’s access end date = 2011-09-29 (14 days access). - He then asks you to cancel his trial. So you go into your payment processor back-office, and cancel his future payments.
- In this case, because it’s a “trial”, if he ever decides to come back down the road and sign up for a trial again, you need him to start all the way AT THE BEGINNING.
- Which means, you must completely remove this person’s access to the product in DAP.
- If you don’t do it, then if he does come back later, then DAP will think he’s an existing user who wants to RESUME his subscription, and will move him past the trial into the next payment period meant only for people who actually stayed past the trial.
Refunds
“Refunds” are a slightly different animal than “Cancellations”. While a subscription “Cancellation” means you only have to stop access going forward, a “Refund” means you have to actually roll-back existing access.
So, doing a refund takes a few steps.
- Go into your payment processor (like Paypal.com, Authorize.net, etc) and refund the actual payment
- Now log into the DAP Dashboard on your site
- Go to the “Orders” page, search for all of the user’s transactions by her email id
- Click on the “Id” link for the transaction that you wish to refund
- On the transaction details page, you will see a “Refund” button. Click on that.
- That will mark that transaction as a refund, and also create a new transaction with a negative value (same as value of original transaction, except negative in value)
- DAP then rolls-back access for that user by one payment period (or “Recurring Cycle #3” from the Product page). So if member is still in month 1, then user will lose complete access to the product. But if member is on month 3, then since only one payment is being refunded, only the last month’s access (month #3’s access) will be rolled back – so now they only have access till month 2.
- Go back to “Manage > Users” screen, search for user by email, and make sure access is either rolled back, or access has been completely removed for that member.
- All Affiliate commissions credited to affiliates for this particular purchase will be automatically and completely rolled back. So the affiliate who referred this purchase, will see a negative commission credited to their account, that cancels out the positive commission credited earlier. So that in effect zeroes out their commissions.
