Recovering failed payments

Recurring payments fail. Expired cards, changed banks, insufficient funds. Dunning is the automatic recovery: retry the charge on a schedule and tell the subscriber, rather than losing them silently.

The retry ladder

When a billing attempt fails, a dunning sequence opens for that subscription. Retries land at 1, 3, 5 and 7 days from the first failure. The offsets are measured from that first failure, not from the previous retry, so the ladder cannot stretch out and drag past the window where a card is still recoverable.

Set how many retries you want under Settings → Failed-payment recovery, up to four. When the ladder is spent, the sequence is marked exhausted and stops.

What stops a retry early

• Dunning is switched off in Settings. Nothing is retried.
• The subscription is cancelled or paused. Terminal and paused contracts are never retried; the sequence is closed immediately.
• A persistent error, such as a payment method that no longer exists. The attempt still advances so it cannot be re-selected forever, backs off, and exhausts when the ladder is spent.

Recovery after the ladder ends

A subscriber who fixes their card after the retries are spent still counts as recovered. The sequence is reclosed as recovered, the churn flag clears, and the amount is credited to your recovered total. Somebody who came back should never be left flagged as churned.

SMS recovery

On the Starter plan and up you can also recover by SMS alongside email. This is enforced on the server, not just hidden in the interface: a store whose plan does not include SMS has the setting forced off even if the stored value says otherwise.

Updating a card

The app never handles card details. When a subscriber needs to update a failing card, the app asks Shopify to email them Shopify's own secure payment-update link. The card is entered on Shopify, not on us and not on you.