Extending membership problems

Why is it so difficult to extend a membership here?

I paid online on November 4th to extend my membership on a monthly basis. I thought it would be easy to extend my membership in advance of its expiry date on November 14. But after several emails telling support staff here that my membership still showed an expiry date of Nov 14, yesterday my membership expired and now I can't use most of the features of this website. I did everything right to extend my membership but I'm getting all the wrong answers and results as a serious Mandarin student here.

Feeling ignored and abandoned.