Feature Release Spotlight: Dunning

Not having the proper failsafes in place to prevent failed payments is a recipe for leaving money on the table for any ecommerce brand, let alone a brand that offers subscriptions. Understanding the importance of this, Upscribe has revamped and released a new payment retry feature (also known as Dunning). 

Our proprietary Dunning engine allows you to retry failed payments with terms that you define. For example, you can choose to retry failed credit cards every 4 days up to a maximum of 5 times, while using an entirely different strategy for issues with insufficient funds by setting those types of payment attempts to retry every 7 days instead.. And unlike other solutions, Upscribe allows you to tailor what seem like minor details that actually lead to major gains. 

Feature Details

As part of our updated Dunning engine, we give merchants the ability to configure their payment retry strategy into five different categories. And for each category, merchants can separately set how often to automatically retry payment processing, as well as define the maximum number of times to automatically retry the payment processing. 

The five categories that a merchant can now select for payment retries include:

1. Semi-permanent issues with a consumer’s payment method (for example, an expired credit card or an invalid credit card number). This is the main category that merchants tend to think about and is called out in the main configuration of the settings within the admin. In order for the payment to go through, the consumer must update their payment method, otherwise the payment will keep failing. 
2. Temporary issues with a consumer’s payment method (for example insufficient funds or a declined payment may cause this issue). In this case, the consumer can update their payment method, but it’s possible the payment will eventually be successful without anything being changed on their end. 
3. Temporary system issue. A temporary issue is a result of unexpected processing errors. For example, a system, like Shopify, may have stopped the payment from processing due to a throughput issue. However, since this is not a permanent issue, the payment will likely be successful without anything being changed. For this category, we don’t allow configuration of how often to retry – we will automatically retry on the scale of hours (not days) to ensure that you don’t lose the transaction. 
4. Semi-permanent configuration issue. This type of issue is a result of a payment provider not being set up in Shopify. In this case, the merchant must make an update within Shopify to allow payments to be processed. Until this is done, no payments will succeed.
5. All other issues.  This is a catch-all for any error codes that are too vague to be categorized, as well as any new error codes we see that haven’t been categorized yet. 

When a payment has failed, we email the consumer each time a failed payment has occurred so they are informed about what is going on and can update their payment method (if needed). For merchant and or system related issues with failed payments, we will send an email out only after all of the failed payment retries have been exhausted. 

In the event that a payment has occurred with a current subscriber, we show where we are in the payment retry process, as well as the date when we will next try to collect payment within the customer profile within Upscribe. 

If a customer logs into the Customer Portal in the middle of a payment retry process, they will see a “Charge Failed” banner with a CTA to view the details of their failed payment. This is done in an effort for the customer to know what they need to update so their payment will go through. 

Stopping payments from failing is an essential part of growing a profitable ecommerce business. So if you are looking to learn more about our Dunning feature and how it can help you from having fewer failed payments, set-up time with us here.