Dunning and failed payments

When a scheduled subscription charge fails, Chargezen starts a dunning cycle: it retries the charge on a schedule, tells the customer, and applies your final action if every retry fails. Configure it in Subscriptions → Dunning (also under Settings → Subscriptions → Payment Recovery).

The failed scheduled charge starts the cycle, and the customer then gets the number of retries you set. With 3 retries, a customer has 4 failed charges in total before the final action applies.

• Card declined email and text message on the first failure.
• Payment retry notice email on later failures.
• Final attempt email before the last retry.
• An email when the final action is applied.

Failures of manual charges and charges started from the customer portal follow the same path.

• Recovered: any successful payment for the subscription closes the cycle and clears its failure state.
• Exhausted: every retry failed, so the final action runs.

• Shopify-side errors such as rate limits, timeouts or an unavailable service don't count against the customer's retries and don't notify the customer. If they keep happening, the charge is marked as a system error and you're alerted.
• Store configuration problems, such as a disabled Shopify payment provider, block the charge and alert you instead of retrying.