When a subscription payment fails, your first instinct might be to retry it immediately. Resist it. When and how often you retry has a large effect on how much revenue you actually recover — and on how your customers feel about it.
Match the retry to the failure
The single biggest improvement you can make is to stop treating every failure identically:
- Insufficient funds — wait. Retrying a day or two later, ideally around a typical payday, dramatically improves success rates.
- Expired card — do not retry blindly. The charge cannot succeed until the customer updates their card, so lead with an email asking them to do so.
- Processing / network error — retry soon. These are often transient and clear within an hour.
- Hard decline / fraud block — retrying repeatedly can worsen your standing with the issuer. Prompt the customer instead.
Use an escalating schedule
A good default is a sequence of retries spread over a week or two — for example after 1 hour, 3 hours, 1 day, 3 days, and 7 days — pairing later attempts with dunning emails. This gives transient issues time to resolve and customers time to act, without giving up too early.
Know when to stop
After a reasonable number of attempts, continuing to retry hurts more than it helps. Cap the sequence, mark the subscription as exhausted, and move the customer to a clear win-back path.
Let software handle the timing
Revivopay applies failure-code-aware retry timing automatically and pairs it with personalised dunning, so you get the recovery benefits of a finely tuned schedule without having to build or maintain one.