Feature Request: Allow admin to process credit card charges through the admin page

[kimcoleman]

A blog comment user asked that we allow the admin to process a real card charge through the add member admin page. Jason responded: "We intended to also allow for charges to be made when using the form, and we were going to move it out of beta then. That part isn’t working yet and seems to be what you are looking for. We don’t have plans to do this coding any time soon."

The user has added to their request. No timeline on when we will do this but I wanted to create a feature request for it.

[michaelbeil]

A customer sent in a ticket (ID 412891) regarding this:

When I try to add an order to a member, the credit card and gateway are not functional even thou I have them set up and working in the normal process.

[wolvyreen]

I'm honestly stumped that this is not part of the core system right out of the box. Creating manual orders and allowing us to choose the gateway should allow the member to pay through that gateway right from their dashboard. It should not even be a question of whether this is or isn't a feature. To not have this available to the member in my opinion is a huge oversight and should be corrected urgently as it renders a subscription based membership system completely useless if we have to manually process orders and then have to every month collect their payment offline. I say this because doing it this way will not create a subscription at the gateway now and it becomes a huge admin task to make sure that we collect the funds manually every single month.

What happened here? It feels like the ball was dropped big time. (no disrespect intended but this is a logical feature that should come standard.)

[andrewlimaza]

@wolvyreen there are a lot of moving parts to payment gateways and subscriptions. Every gateway handles things differently and have different requirements around adhoc charges. (This generally means some will work, some won't depending on how we integrate with these gateways and/or if there are any limitations from their end - this is why it takes time for us to move on big decisions like this).

Most gateways require authentication from the account holder, as you can imagine the amount of fraud that can happen if gateways bypass this entirely - this is a different situation for existing customer's that may already have a subscription with you (in which some gateways allow you to add additional products to their merchant account/subscriptions).

A few ways to make this easier (for now) for the customer would be:

1. Adjust the email sent to the member to include steps to complete their payment by checking out for their membership level (you can generate the checkout links to collect payments).
2. Send a payment request if your gateway supports this for customers to pay it and include it in their email.
3. Use some custom notices on your membership site to nudge user's to checkout again (in their account page, billing pages or a popup banner of sorts).
4. If you have the customer's details you can checkout on your site's checkout page with their information to complete the process and charge them correctly - I've seen some site owners do this in the past for debit-order type of solutions (but you might need access to authentication/OTPs etc)
5. Reach out to a local WordPress developer to implement this feature if you need it urgently, and you can submit it back to this open source project which may be included in a future release (no guarantee).

I hope this helps for the time being, thanks for understanding that this isn't something easy to implement and we are working towards improving payments in Paid Memberships Pro in general to handle subscriptions better which may help us implement these type of features quicker across the gateways we support.

[wolvyreen]

Well, in that case I am going to completely ignore the manual order process and simply cancel the members subscription and ask them to reprocess a new one which ultimately makes the whole manual creation of orders by admins redundant.

I don't know if I can agree with everything you say. Yes they are good points but in my opinion not a reason to skip this feature in the system entirely upon release. I don't know of any other online membership subscription software that doesn't have the ability to allow their customers to pay for a manually created order/invoice by an admin via the set payment gateway.

Just my 2 cents when I think of other memberships systems out there. Don't get me wrong, I really like PMPro but this just seems like a massive oversight.

[michaelbeil]

A customer sent in a ticket (492551) about this:

I would like to add a new member and select a membership level – then charge a credit card. I am able to add a member and select a membership level. However, I the “Payment” pulldown menu offers two options:
“Gateway (Not Functional)” and “Credit Card (Not Functional). How do I enter the credit card information?