Recovering failed payments for subscription store?

Payments + Shipping & Fulfilment
1

Any other Shopify store owners here who run a subscription biz? I am wondering how you handle payment failures e.g.

  • Customer1 is subscribed to $50 per month goodie box
  • Customer2 is on buy one item every month automatically to get 10% off

But many times, for such customers the payment fails (credit card expired, no funds etc) and then Shopify marks them as inactive.

2

Hi,

When it comes to failed payments in our Seal Subscriptions app, you’re able to turn on the option to send customers an email for each failed payment with instructions on how to update their payment method, which you can turn on in Seal Subscriptions > Settings > Notifications > Customer notifications > Billing failed e-mail.

By default, Seal Subscriptions will retry the failed payments 3 times with a day in between each retry, before the subscription is cancelled, however you can change this.

You can change how many times the app should retry, the delay between retries, and what should happen to the subscription when the retry limit is reached, as configured in your Seal Subscriptions app > Settings > General Settings > Billing settings.

Hope this helps!

3

This thread still ranks well in search, so here’s a current answer for anyone landing on it: recovering failed subscription payments is really three separate jobs, and most setups only do the first one.

  1. Retries — your subscription app already does this. The two settings worth checking today: how many retries with what spacing (3 retries spaced a few days apart beats daily hammering — “insufficient funds” needs time, not attempts), and what happens after the last retry. If that setting says “cancel,” a temporary card problem permanently deletes a subscriber. Pick “pause” if your app offers it.
  2. Card updates — retries can’t fix an expired or replaced card. That needs the customer to act, which means an email with a direct link to update the payment method (fewer steps = more updates). Check whether your app sends these automatically and what they look like; this is where a surprising share of recoverable revenue actually comes back.
  3. Knowing what leaked — the part almost nobody does. Once a month, pull renewals with a failed/cancelled-after-retries status and put a dollar figure on them. The number is usually bigger than expected, and it tells you whether jobs 1 and 2 are actually working or just configured.

The decline reason matters throughout: “insufficient funds” recovers with patient retries, “expired card” only recovers with a card update, and a few codes (stolen card, closed account) recover with neither — chasing those just annoys people.

(Disclosure: I build a merchant-side tool in this space, so this is the stuff I stare at all day. If you want the longer version, I wrote it up here: Involuntary churn on Shopify: the subscribers you lose without a goodbye | Moorly — but the settings check above needs no tools.)