When a subscription renewal is declined, PlatformDTC retries it on a schedule chosen for the reason it was declined, emails your customer before and after each attempt, and keeps the subscription on hold instead of cancelling it when a card simply runs out of funds. The settings live at Subscriptions → Failed payments. This page describes the Smart AI retry strategy, under Dunning & Smart Retries. The Fixed schedule strategy retries on the days you list, but the one-attempt-per-card limit, the hold after the last retry, and the rule that a permanent decline is never retried apply to both strategies.

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When renewals are charged

  • On the renewal date, at the time of day the customer checked out. Every renewal is charged on the subscription’s billing day — the same day each cycle as the original checkout — and is never moved to a different day. A renewal only runs on another day when you reschedule, delay or skip it, or when a declined renewal is being retried (see Retry schedule).
  • Monthly plans renew on the same day each month. A subscription started on the 5th renews on the 5th, and a yearly plan on the same date each year. When a month is shorter, the renewal falls on its last day and returns to the usual day the month after: a subscription started on January 31 renews on February 28, then on March 31. Plans set to a number of days (for example “every 30 days”) still renew exactly that many days apart.
  • The first renewal is one plan interval after checkout. A monthly subscription bought on September 28 first renews on October 28; one on an “every 3 months” plan on December 28. There is no separate wait before the first charge: to sell a bundle that ships several months of product, sell it on the longer plan (for example every 2 or 3 months). Checkout links created with a wait still work; the wait is ignored.

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Retry schedule

Every card decline is sorted into one of three groups, using both the decline reason and the raw response code the customer’s bank sent. If either one says the card must not be retried, it isn’t.
  • If the card network says how long to wait, we wait at least that long, even past the 72 hours for a refer-to-the-bank retry.
  • Each retry is judged on its own decline. If a retry comes back with a permanent decline, no further retries are made.
  • Retries run at your store’s retry hour, in the customer’s local time — 14:00 unless you change it. The customer’s time zone comes from the state and country on their shipping address, or from their customer record when the subscription has no address.
  • At most one automatic attempt per card in any 24 hours, counted across every subscription charged to that card. This applies to both retry strategies.
  • Recovery discount. If Recovery discount (%) is on, it unlocks after 3 failed attempts by default, so it applies to the final retry. A prepaid card out of funds gets its one retry with the discount.

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Insufficient funds: retried on payday

Waiting a fixed number of days gives a card with no money in it no better chance. Waiting for the customer to be paid does: on our stores, a retry made after a payday had passed recovered 15.9% of insufficient-funds declines, against 9.1% when no payday had passed in between.
  • Each retry runs on the customer’s next likely payday, using the payroll calendar of their country (the payday table below), at your retry hour in the customer’s own time zone.
  • Learned paydays. When a customer’s earlier payment recovered right after a payday, we learn their fortnightly payday and aim at that one.
  • Never sooner than 24 hours after the decline, and never before a wait the card network asks for.
  • No payday within 7 days? That retry falls back to the 2, 5 and 8-day calendar.
  • At most 6 attempts in total (7 on PayPal). When they run out the subscription is held Past due — a subscription is never cancelled for insufficient funds.
  • Prepaid cards get one retry. Waiting doesn’t refill a prepaid card — on our stores they recovered 2.6% of the time. A prepaid card out of funds gets one retry, on the next payday and with your recovery discount if you set one; then the subscription is held Past due and the customer is asked to use a different card.
  • One in five insufficient-funds retries stays on the 2, 5 and 8-day calendar on purpose, so the effect of payday timing on your recoveries can be measured.
  • The customer is reminded the day before — see Emails your customers receive.

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Paydays

Paydays follow the country in the customer’s shipping address: A payday that falls on a weekend counts as the Friday before. Puerto Rico, Guam, the US Virgin Islands, the Northern Mariana Islands and American Samoa follow the US calendar.

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If the payment still doesn’t go through

After the last retry fails, the subscription is not cancelled. It stays Past due and nothing more is charged automatically. Your customer receives up to 4 requests to update their payment method, at least 3 days apart. As soon as they update or re-enter their card, the payment is retried immediately. They can still cancel at any time. This applies to both retry strategies. If your store has PayPal Card Processing connected, the update page lets them save their card with PayPal, and the payment is retried on PayPal right away — see Card renewals that failed. After a permanent decline, or a refer-to-the-bank decline whose one retry is declined again, nothing is retried automatically. The subscription goes Past due and your customer receives the same update-payment-method requests. If Cancel when a declined card is never replaced is on, a subscription held for a permanent decline is cancelled once all 4 requests go unanswered. A refer-to-the-bank hold is never cancelled automatically — it stays Past due until the customer pays, updates their card or cancels. When the problem is your PayPal account, not the customer’s. If PayPal refuses a renewal because your own PayPal account is restricted, locked or can’t receive payments, the customer is not emailed and not asked to update anything. The renewal waits and is retried automatically (at least every 12 hours), and your dashboard shows an alert — PayPal is refusing renewals — with a link to your payment settings. Once PayPal is fixed, the waiting renewals go through on their own.

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Reading the Past due numbers on your dashboard

Subscriptions shows a Billing needs attention notice when something is behind. It separates the two kinds of Past due subscription, because they need opposite things from you:
  • Awaiting a new payment method — the card or PayPal account was declined for good, or there is no saved payment method at all. Nothing is being retried, and no retry could succeed: only a new payment method from the customer clears these. The card-update requests described above are already going out, and if Cancel when a declined card is never replaced is on, a permanent decline is cancelled once those requests go unanswered. This is the number worth acting on — a personal message from you recovers subscriptions that an automated email does not.
  • Overdue (retrying automatically) — the saved card is still good and the renewal is still in the retry schedule. There is nothing for you to do. This number is normally 0 or close to it, because retries run every few minutes; if it stays high, contact support, because it means the charges themselves are not running rather than that the cards are bad.
Opening a Past due subscription tells you which of the two it is in the same words.

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Emails your customers receive

  • Before each renewal — 3 days before by default. The reminder shows the amount and the date, asks the customer to make sure their card has enough available, and links to update the payment method, skip, pause and manage the subscription. It also links to cancel, unless your store runs a cancellation flow.
  • After a failed attempt that will be retried — when we’ll try again. For insufficient funds, it asks the customer to make sure funds are available before that date or to switch cards.
  • The day before an insufficient-funds retry — the Payment retry reminder, by email and SMS: when we will try again, and to make sure funds are available or update their card. It is on by default; turn it off in Subscriptions → Emails.
  • Before the final retry — a last-retry notice saying the subscription will be put on hold, not cancelled, if that attempt fails. For a refer-to-the-bank decline, the one retry is the final retry.
  • After a permanent decline — a notice that the payment didn’t go through, with a link to update the payment method.
  • After retries run out — the update-payment-method requests described above.
Failure and card-update emails are sent only when Dunning emails is on, under Billing engine emails. If it is off, your customers receive none of them — no retry notices, no last-retry notice and no requests to update their card.

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Seeing which declines cost you the most

Subscriptions → Overview has a Failure Reasons table: every decline reason a renewal came back with in the period you have selected, how many charges it cost you, how many of those you got back, the recovery rate and the volume declined. Each reason is named by the code your customer’s bank or PayPal actually returned — Insufficient funds, Do not honor, Lost card, Transaction not allowed — not by the retry group it belongs to, so two reasons that are both never retried still read as two different problems. Click a reason to open its history. Two charts, because a total on its own cannot tell you whether a reason is getting worse:
  • Failed and recovered charges per day — how much it costs you, and how much of that comes back.
  • Its share of all your failures, and its own recovery rate — the share is what a count hides. If your renewal volume doubles, every reason’s count goes up; a reason whose share is climbing is the one that changed.
The dialog also says what the retry engine does with that reason, using the groups in the table above — whether it is retried on payday, retried once, or not retried at all. Everything on this table and in the charts is counted by the date of the renewal’s first charge attempt. A renewal that failed on the 3rd and was recovered by a retry on the 8th counts as a failure and a recovery on the 3rd, so a period’s recovery rate is about the renewals that started in it. A gap in the share line is a day when no renewal failed at all — there is nothing for the reason to be a share of. A gap in the recovery line is a day when that reason did not decline. Neither is drawn as 0%.

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Settings

All in Subscriptions → Failed payments:
  • Pre-renewal reminder → Reminder emails — turns the pre-renewal reminder on or off.
  • Pre-renewal reminder → Lead time (days) — how many days before the renewal the reminder is sent: 0 to 14, 3 by default. 0 turns the reminder off.
  • Dunning & Smart Retries → Retry strategy — Smart AI retry, described on this page, or Fixed schedule.
  • Dunning & Smart Retries → Max attempts — the most attempts a declined renewal gets, including the first.
  • Dunning & Smart Retries → Retry hour (customer’s local time) — the hour automatic retries run in each customer’s time zone, 14 by default. Renewals themselves are charged at the time of day the customer checked out.
  • Dunning & Smart Retries → Recovery discount (%) and Offer discount after N failures — an optional one-cycle discount on a renewal that keeps failing, unlocked after 3 failures by default.
  • Dunning & Smart Retries → Cancel when a declined card is never replaced — cancels a subscription after a permanent decline once the update-payment-method requests go unanswered.
  • Billing engine emails → Dunning emails — failure, retry and card-update emails.
  • Payment retry reminder, on Subscriptions → Emails — the email and SMS sent the day before an insufficient-funds retry.