How Paid Access Follows FluentCart
Most of the work in a paid newsletter comes after the first sale: a card that fails, a subscriber who cancels halfway through the month, a refund. Each one should change what that reader can read and which list they’re on, without you touching anything.
MailerHive watches FluentCart for those events and rebuilds each reader’s access from their orders and subscriptions. It only reads FluentCart and never changes an order or a subscription.
Subscriptions
| FluentCart status | Access |
|---|---|
| Active or trialing | Until the next billing date, plus the grace period |
| Past due or failing | Same, so FluentCart can retry the payment |
| Canceled, expiring or completed | Until the end of the period already paid for |
| Paused | None while paused |
| Expired | None |
| Pending or not yet authenticated | None until the first payment |
The grace period applies to every active subscription, not just failed ones. It gives FluentCart time to retry a renewal before a reader notices anything.
One-Time Plans
- Fixed term: access for the length set in the plan, starting on the payment date.
- Stacking: a second fixed-term purchase in the same tier, bought before the first runs out, starts where the first ends.
- Lifetime: access with no end date.
Refunds and Canceled Orders
- A full refund ends access from that order.
- A partial refund keeps access.
- A canceled order never grants access.
Refunds and cancellations happen in FluentCart. MailerHive picks them up from there.
MailerPress Lists and Tags
MailerHive keeps each paying reader’s MailerPress contact in step with their access:
- One tier list. The reader sits on the list of their highest active tier and comes off any lower tier list. Issues for lower tiers still reach them, because those drafts go to every higher tier’s list too.
- A tier tag, such as “Paid: Insider”. When access ends, the tier tag comes off and “Paid: Lapsed” goes on.
- Free lists. With Free issues on, paying readers are added to your free lists and stay there after a plan ends.
- New contacts. A buyer who isn’t in MailerPress yet is added as subscribed, with the source “mailerhive_paid”.
- Unsubscribed contacts are subscribed again on purchase when Purchases is on, and the purchase is added to their consent record.
- Blocked contacts. Bounced, complained, invalid, suppressed or spam contacts, and any contact with a “Suppression:” tag, are never added to a list. They’re taken off the tier lists instead.
Renaming a tier changes the tag MailerHive uses from then on. Contacts keep the tag with the old name until you remove it in MailerPress.
When Updates Happen
- Right after a FluentCart event, such as a payment, renewal, cancellation, pause or refund.
- Every hour, to catch access that ran out and update lists and tags.
- About 30 seconds after you change tiers, plans or lists on the Paid tab.
- When you select Re-check all purchases under Paid members, or run
wp mailerhive paid reconcile.
Access itself ends at the exact expiry time, whatever the schedule. The hourly run only moves readers between lists. If WP-Cron is switched off on your site, ensure a server cron runs it, or list changes will lag.
If FluentCart can’t be read during an update, MailerHive changes nothing for that reader and tries again on the next run.