Invoice not paid, Credit Card on file, but product previously paid with PayPal

[ScottN]

Scenario:

• Years ago, Customer orders a domain and hosting, and used PayPal to pay for the hosting.
• Every year, they login and pay the renewal invoices for the domain and hosting with PayPal (not using a PayPal subscription -- they login and do manual payments).
• Now, they decide they want to stop using PayPal and start using a Credit Card... so they go to My Account > Manage Credit Card, and they ADD a Credit Card to their account.
• The due date rolls around for their domain and hosting renewal invoices... Sadly, the customer's invoices remain unpaid, their domain expires, and customer is upset.  They put a credit card on file, but it is not used???

How can I fix this?  Is there a setting somewhere that I can tell WHMCS to use a credit card on file, if there is an invoice due... no matter what previous payment method was selected?

- Scott

[brian!]

the invoice would have had a payment method already assigned to it, e.g PayPal, so WHMCS will just be following that setting.

I think the client, or you as an admin, should have chosen cc as the default payment method... you can do it from the admin profile for them, or they should be able to change it themselves from their client area profile.

https://docs.whmcs.com/Clients:Profile_Tab#Payment_Method

[ScottN]

Thanks, Brian.  Ugh, I was afraid of this.  I didn't know anything about this, so the "you as an admin should have done..." makes no sense.  The customer simply wanted to put a card on file, so their bill get paid automatically. How would a customer possibly know to dig through their profile to find some payment setting.  I suppose I'll have to hack the "manage credit card" page to put some type of notice that "This card is meaningless and will never be used, unless you dig through your Account Profile and find some payment setting and switch it to 'credit card'"  

I'm probably the only one that wants a card on file to be used IN ALL CASES, if a bill is due, and hasn't been paid via any other means.  I just don't understand why the rest of the WHMCS community would want the system to act like this. If a customer's bill is due, and they have a card on file, who cares what other payment methods were used in the past (PayPal or Check)... if the client puts a card on file, and they have a bill due, we should have the option to force the use of that card to get the bill paid.

Time for a feature request that nobody will vote for and won't be implemented.

- Scott

[twhiting9275]

Hi Scott,

I can totally see where you're coming from with this, and yes, WHMCS should probably notify the individual if they're changing their card that this happens. Would be a great thing to have in there

To add this, pretty easy. just add the following to templates/yourtemplate/clientareacreditcard.tpl

<p><h1>Please note!!</h1><br />
<p> 
If you have existing subscriptions using Paypal and are adding a credit card for the first time, you <b>must</b> <a href="/submitticket.php">contact us</a> in order to switch these from Paypal to Credit Card.

 

Make sure to add that above anything else, and of course, please adjust the text to your own liking

[brian!]

Hi Scott,

On 2/2/2018 at 17:13, ScottN said:

I didn't know anything about this, so the "you as an admin should have done..." makes no sense. 

perhaps badly phrased on my part.

On 2/2/2018 at 17:13, ScottN said:

The customer simply wanted to put a card on file, so their bill get paid automatically. How would a customer possibly know to dig through their profile to find some payment setting.

I guess the counter-argument would be if WHMCS automatically assigned the newly added cc to all invoices, you'd then get some customers complaining that they didn't want that to occur... but I know that's not the point you're making, it's the lack of instructions (or lack of thought in the process) that you are most concerned about.

I did quickly try to find the documentation on this when posting, but I couldn't find any - it's one of those things you know from experience, but isn't detailed in the docs (plenty of examples of that unfortunately).

as Tom suggests, you can add any instructions you wish to the page with a quick template tweak or hook.