Failed payments

Cards expire, funds run out, banks decline. On a subscription business this is routine rather than exceptional — and how you handle it is one of the larger levers on revenue you already earned.

What happens automatically

When a renewal charge fails:

1. The subscription moves to past due
2. The customer is emailed, with a link to update their payment method
3. We retry on a schedule
4. If every retry fails, the subscription is cancelled and you are told

The customer updates their card on a page Shopify hosts. We never see the number, and the link works without them remembering a password.

The retry schedule

Retries are spaced out rather than hammered, because an immediate retry on a declined card almost always declines again. Spacing them across several days catches the common cases: a payday, a replaced card, a fraud hold released.

You can adjust the number of retries and the final action — cancel, or leave past due for you to handle — under Settings → Dunning.

Watching it

Operations → Failed payments lists everything currently past due, how many retries remain, and when the next one is. This is the queue worth checking weekly: each row is a customer who wanted your product and whose card simply did not work.

Recovering manually

For a high-value subscriber, a personal email recovers more than an automated sequence. Open the subscriber, use Send payment update link, and Shopify emails them its own hosted page.

You can also retry a charge immediately rather than waiting for the schedule.

Reducing failures in the first place

• Turn on renewal reminders. A customer who knows a charge is coming is likelier to have funds and likelier to update an expired card before it fails.
• Let customers pause. A pause is a deferred sale; a failed charge on someone who wanted to stop is a dunning sequence aimed at a person who has already left.
• Watch for a pattern. A spike in failures on one date usually means something structural — a price change, a currency issue, or a card bin being blocked.

What a customer sees

The email is plain: their subscription could not be charged, here is what to do, here is the link. It does not threaten or use urgency, because the most common cause is an expired card rather than an unwilling customer.

Once they update, the retry succeeds and the subscription returns to active on its normal schedule. No cycle is skipped and no delivery is lost.