Failed payments

When a scheduled subscription charge fails, Chargezen tries again on a schedule, tells the customer, and applies your final action if every retry fails. Set it up in Subscriptions → Billing & automation → Dunning, under Failed payment retries.

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.

Each wait counts from the latest failure. With the defaults, retries happen 1, 4, 9 and 16 days after the first failure.

After a recovered payment, the next charge is counted from the day the payment succeeded, or from the original charge date if you prefer. Change it with Post-dunning billing date in Subscription settings → Billing. See Billing schedule.

Failed payment messages are default workflows, so you can edit them, add steps or set them to Draft under Subscriptions → Billing & automation → Workflow automations:

• Card declined email and Card declined text on the first failure.
• Payment retry email on each retry that fails again.
• Payment failed: cancelled, Payment failed: paused or Payment failed: final notice when retries run out, matching your final action.
• Payment recovered text when a retry succeeds.
• Bank confirmation email and text when the bank asks the customer to confirm a payment.

To build your own, use the triggers Subscription payment failed (first attempt), Subscription payment failed (in dunning), Subscription payment failed (last attempt) and Subscription payment recovered (after a failed payment). The condition Payment retries ended by tells apart cancel, pause, skip and keep. Failures of manual charges and charges started from the customer portal follow the same path.

• Recovered: a successful payment closes the cycle and clears its failure state.
• Retries ran out: every retry failed, so the final action ran. Find these in Orders → Failed.

• Store setup problems, like a disabled Shopify payment provider, and charges Shopify rejects before trying them stop retries and show Needs your action until you fix them.
• Temporary Shopify errors such as timeouts are retried quietly. They don't count against the customer's retries and don't notify the customer. If they keep happening, the charge shows System error.
• Out-of-stock products are retried without telling the customer their payment failed.

See Charge errors for every reason and its fix.

Open Subscriptions → Analytics → Dashboards → Order Errors. Payment error recoveryshows payment errors, recovered revenue and the recovery rate, then errors by type and how retries performed. See Analytics dashboards.

Check that the Card declined workflows are Active, not Draft, in Workflow automations. Then check the subscription's Logs with the Notifications filter to see what was sent.

The default final action is Keep active for manual handling. Change If every retry fails to cancel, pause or skip instead.

Yes. Open the charge from Orders → In dunning and choose Retry charge now, or send the customer Send payment update link first.

• Failed payment recovery: how Chargezen gets renewals paid.
• Glossary: dunning management, involuntary churn, decline code.