Proper Failed Billing Attempt Followup

[Brian_S]

When merchants see that a billing attempt has failed they often followup with their customers (or sometimes customers ping the merchant because they're also notified of the failure) and they try to use the error message returned from Shopify like "insufficient funds", etc to debug the payment issue.  But many times (recently it seems like more times than not) the customer convinces the merchant that they've followed up with their bank and the reason for the failure is invalid.  Naturally the merchant turns to us as the Subscription app and understandably thinks that we're responsible for making sure that payment methods are charged correctly.

Since we (subscription apps) are not the ones charging the payment methods there's very little additional information we can provide. 

I'm curious if Shopify has any suggestion or easy path forward for merchants in these cases. The only thing we've been able to do in the past is open an email thread with shopify support and the merchant together 

[qc11]

Hi,

We don't have any easy paths at the moment. But we do have the plan to update our public documentation to better clarify billing attempt errors in the near future.

Hope this helps!