Smart payment recovery automatically retries failed subscription payments and sends your customers timely emails with a one-click way to fix their card — so you recover revenue that would otherwise be lost to failed cards, without chasing customers yourself.
What Smart payment recovery does
When a subscription payment fails, Smart payment recovery looks at why it failed and responds with the right strategy. A temporary problem like insufficient funds is retried automatically over the following days. A card-related problem like an expired card is not blindly retried — instead the customer is emailed a clear way to switch to another card. Throughout, your customer receives a short series of emails that explain what happened and how to fix it.
When the customer replaces the card that failed, Smart payment recovery charges the payment they missed straight away, on their new card. It does this only when the subscription's next billing date is more than three days off, so the customer is not charged twice within a few days. If the next billing date is closer than that, or the subscription has no next billing date, the missed payment is left uncollected and the next order charges the new card as usual.
Smart payment recovery can also collect a missed renewal after recovery for it has already ended. If a customer replaces their card once recovery has finished, Subi makes one charge for the renewal they missed — but only when the subscription’s next billing date is more than half a billing cycle away (about 15 days on a monthly plan, or around six months on a yearly one), so a customer on a longer plan is never charged two renewals within a few weeks. If the next billing date is closer than that, or a newer subscription for the same product already exists, no charge is made and the next order simply bills the new card.
It also works ahead of time: when a saved card is about to expire, Smart payment recovery can email the customer before the next charge even runs, so the payment succeeds on the first try.
Which stores get it, and which plan unlocks what
New Subi stores get the Short recovery window active automatically — there is nothing to turn on. On 6 October 2026, Subi moved most stores that were still on the older classic recovery to Smart payment recovery. A store that is still on classic recovery keeps working as before and can switch whenever it chooses (see "If your store is on classic recovery" below).
Longer recovery windows and the advanced controls are tiered:
All plans — the Short recovery window, automatic retries, and customer recovery emails.
Subi plan — the Standard recovery window, a custom sender name and reply-to address, and per-row actions on the sequences list.
Subi Plus — the Aggressive recovery window, proactive card-expiry (pre-dunning) emails, advanced email customization, and bulk actions plus CSV export on the sequences list.
Locked controls are still visible on the page with an upgrade prompt, so you can see what a higher plan unlocks.
Where to find it
Open Retention → Payment recovery in your Subi admin. At the top of the page a short performance strip shows how recovery is doing (see "Monitoring recovery" below); below it the settings are grouped into two sections:
Recovery behaviour — how and when Subi retries a failed payment: the Recovery window, If recovery fails (the fallback action) and Recovered billing orders.
Customer messaging — what the customer receives, and through which channel. Under Email you will find Sender identity, Pre-dunning and Customer emails; under SMS, the SMS reminders box.
The page header shows a status badge and at the top right a Watch how button, which plays a short video of setting up the page, and a More actions menu that holds View all sequences and Deactivate recovery. The help article for the page is linked at the very bottom, under Learn more about. If your store is on classic recovery, this same page is also where you switch to Smart payment recovery.
Choosing a recovery window
The recovery window controls how long Subi keeps trying to recover a failed payment and how the customer emails are paced. You choose one of three presets:
Short — the briefest retry and email schedule. Active by default on every new store and available on all plans.
Standard — a longer schedule that recovers more payments. Available on the Subi plan.
Aggressive — the longest schedule for maximum recovery. Available on Subi Plus.
The recovery window sits in the Recovery behaviour section. Under each window, two lines spell out what it does for each kind of decline: a Temporary decline (such as insufficient funds) gets retries and reminder emails on set days, and a Card needs replacing decline (such as an expired card) gets at most one retry. For example, Standard retries a temporary decline on days 1, 3, 7 and 14, and retries a card that needs replacing once, on day 3. Pick a tile, then save with the bar that appears at the top of the page.
Setting your sender identity
In the Sender identity box under Customer messaging → Email, on the Subi and Subi Plus plans you can set the From name and Reply-to email used on recovery emails — for example "Sarah from Acme Subscriptions" instead of a generic store name. A recognizable sender improves open rates and helps customers trust the email. On the Free plan, recovery emails use your store name and a default no-reply address.
Choosing a fallback action
If every retry is used up and the payment still has not recovered, the fallback action — set in the If recovery fails box under Recovery behaviour — decides what happens to the subscription. You can have Subi pause or cancel the subscription, and a final email is sent to the customer letting them know and inviting them to update their card to resume.
On the default setting, Subi pauses the subscription, and memberships are paused the same way as regular subscriptions rather than cancelled. A paused member who updates their card resumes their membership and keeps the days they had already paid for.
If you use Subi's Klaviyo integration, the moment recovery ends without the payment being recovered Subi can also send a Subscription Recovery Ended event to Klaviyo, so you can follow up with your own win-back flow — see How do I connect Subi with Klaviyo?
What your customers receive
Customers receive a short, escalating series of recovery emails — typically on day 0, day 3, and (on longer windows) day 7 and day 14. Each email leads with the specific reason the payment failed and gives a clear way to fix it: a primary Update payment method button, and — when the customer has another card saved — one-click buttons to switch to that card and retry immediately.
While Smart payment recovery is active, a customer gets one email per failed payment. The recovery email takes the place of Subi's standard failed-payment notice for that charge, so the same failed payment is never announced twice. If you have customized your own failed-payment email but not the Day 0 — Payment failed recovery email, your own email is sent when the payment first fails and on retries that come without a recovery email, and the Day 0 email is skipped. On a retry that comes with the Day 3, Day 7 or Day 14 email, the customer gets only that recovery email. Once you customize the Day 0 email too, it is sent in place of your failed-payment email. Stores that have not switched to Smart payment recovery are unaffected and keep sending the standard notice as before.
When the failed payment is for a membership, the default recovery emails talk about the membership instead of a subscription — for example the Day 7 subject reads "Final notice: Your membership", and a reason such as an expired card asks the member to add an up-to-date card to keep their membership active. The Day 14 email also tells the member what will happen if the payment still fails: that their membership will be cancelled or paused, or — when you chose to skip — that this renewal will be skipped and the next one charged on its usual date. If you have saved your own version of a recovery email, that version is sent to members exactly as you wrote it.
Customers can also act from their subscription portal, without waiting for an email. A failed-payment banner names the card that failed and offers Update card to fix it.
When the customer has another payment method saved (another card, Shop Pay or PayPal), the banner also shows Pay now. It opens a list of their saved payment methods. The customer picks one, and the failed order is charged with it right away. If the payment goes through, the banner shows Payment received and the chosen method stays on the subscription for future orders. If it is declined, the subscription goes back to the payment method it had before, and the customer can try again. Pay now appears only when your customer portal lets customers change their payment method.
You can preview every customer email before anything is sent. Under Customer messaging → Email, the Customer emails box lists the templates by name — Day 0 — Payment failed, Day 3 — Reminder, Day 7 — Reminder, Day 14 — Final notice and Pre-dunning — Card expiring soon. Select the … menu at the end of a row to Preview that email or, on plans that unlock customization, to Edit it; a template your plan does not unlock shows Upgrade to unlock instead.
The Email customers about failed payments checkbox at the top of the same box controls the Day 0 to Day 14 emails for your whole store. Turn it off to keep retrying failed cards silently — those emails stop sending, including to customers whose card was declined outright. Pre-dunning keeps its own setting.
One switch outside this page can also stop these emails. In Notifications → Customer notifications, the Subscription payment failed toggle governs every failed-payment email Subi sends your customers. While it is off, Smart payment recovery sends them nothing about a failed payment — no Day 0 to Day 14 emails and no card-update link — even if Email customers about failed payments is on here. Retries still run, silently. Turn that toggle on if you want recovery to email your customers.
Proactive card-expiry alerts
On Subi Plus, Smart payment recovery can email customers before a saved card expires — a "your card may be expiring soon" message sent ahead of the next billing date. This often prevents the failed payment from happening at all. It is a switch in the Pre-dunning box under Customer messaging → Email, so you can turn it off for your store if you prefer. On plans that do not include it, the box shows a padlock and reads Available on Subi Plus.
SMS reminders
The SMS reminders box under Customer messaging → SMS lets Subi text the customer on Day 3 and Day 7 with a link to update their card, on top of the recovery emails. Turn on the Send recovery SMS reminders switch to enable it. Texts go only to customers who opted in to SMS, they are billed to your account per message, and a customer can reply STOP to opt out.
While the switch is off, the box reminds you that no recovery texts are sent and that email recovery still runs, and links to Notifications, where you manage your SMS sender, consent and templates. If SMS is not yet set up for your store, or not included in your plan, the box says so and the switch stays locked until it is.
What happens when my store's own payment settings refuse a renewal?
Some failed payments are not the customer's card at all: your store's payment settings refused the charge. When a renewal fails because your payment provider is not enabled for subscriptions, the payment method is not accepted by your gateway settings, your payment provider account has an error, or a payment rule on your store blocked it, Smart payment recovery handles it differently from a card decline, because retrying the charge or asking the customer for a new card cannot fix it.
The row names the setting. On the sequences list the decline type now shows a short reason in Shopify's own words, for example Payment provider not on for subscriptions, with From Shopify beneath it; hover the label to see the full explanation. The status reads Awaiting merchant.
Your customer is not asked to fix anything. No recovery email, no payment-failure email and no SMS asks them to update their card for these failures.
You get one email. Subi emails you once for each kind of setting failure, at most once every 30 days, naming the setting and linking straight to your payment settings in Shopify.
The recovery closes by itself after 14 days. The subscription is not paused or cancelled, whatever your fallback action says, and its next billing date does not change. Once you fix the setting, the next scheduled renewal bills as normal.
They are counted separately. These renewals are left out of your recovery rate and at-risk MRR, but they are counted in the Failed payments stat and listed in its report, so you can still see them.
To fix one, open your Shopify admin's payment settings and correct the setting the email or the row names, for example by enabling your payment provider for subscriptions. If a renewal is still due in the current cycle, you can use Retry now on the sequence once the setting is fixed.
Monitoring recovery
There are four places to keep an eye on recovery:
Payment recovery page — the performance strip at the top of the page shows your recovery rate, recovered revenue, at-risk MRR and Failed payments for the selected period, and each stat is now a link. Failed payments opens the full failed-payments report for that period; the other three open the Analytics Contracts tab. Renewals that failed on a store payment setting are still left out of the recovery rate (so the rate reflects only the payments Smart payment recovery could actually work on), but they are included in Failed payments.
Analytics → Contracts tab — two cards cover your failed payments: Failure reasons (how many contracts each payment gateway error code hit) and Failed payments over time (failed contracts per day). Each opens the full report, where you can filter, sort and export. The full Failed payments report (every failed billing attempt, newest first) opens from the Failed payments stat on the Payment recovery page, and its back arrow brings you back there.
Sequences list — open it from More actions → View all sequences at the top right of the page. It is a full, filterable list of in-progress and finished recoveries. From here you can retry, skip, or mark a sequence as lost, and (on Subi Plus) apply actions in bulk or export to CSV.
Subscription detail — each subscription shows a Payment recovery panel with the failure reason, the current step, and the next scheduled action.
The payment section of your Analytics overview also adds an active-recovery figure, a failure-reason breakdown, and a retry funnel.
What "Card updated, not collected" means
A finished recovery can end in one of three states. Recovered means the money arrived. Terminated means recovery stopped without it. Card updated, not collected is the state in between: the customer did replace the card that failed, but the payment they missed was not collected — either because their next billing date was within three days, or because the charge on the new card was declined.
Nothing further happens automatically on a subscription in that state: no more retries and no more recovery emails. The subscription itself keeps running, and its next order charges the new card. If the customer replaces their card again while that missed payment is still the open one, Smart payment recovery tries it once more.
Pausing and resuming Smart payment recovery
You can pause all Smart payment recovery activity for your store at any time — for example during a billing review or a quiet period — without losing your configuration. Open Retention → Payment recovery; the page header shows a status badge, and the More actions menu at the top right holds Deactivate recovery. When recovery is off, an Activate recovery button takes its place in the header.
To pause, open More actions, select Deactivate recovery and confirm. The badge changes to Deactivated, a banner appears at the top of the page, and the change saves immediately. While recovery is deactivated:
No new card retries are attempted, and no recovery emails are sent.
Recovery sequences that are already in progress stay paused the whole time recovery is off, and resume only when you reactivate — they are not cancelled.
All of your recovery settings — window, fallback action, sender identity, and email content — are preserved.
Deactivating is not the same as switching back to classic recovery: your smart settings stay exactly as they are. Note that a payment which fails while recovery is deactivated is not retried by Smart payment recovery or by classic recovery until you turn recovery back on.
To resume, select Activate recovery from the page header or the banner. Recovery turns back on immediately, with no confirmation step, and any paused sequences continue on their next scheduled run.
If your store is on classic recovery
Most stores on Subi's older classic recovery were moved to Smart payment recovery on 6 October 2026. If your store is still on classic recovery, it keeps working exactly as before until you switch. When you are ready to switch, open Retention → Payment recovery: a "Smart payment recovery is available" banner sits right above your classic recovery settings. Selecting Switch to Smart recovery opens a before-and-after comparison built from your own store: the left column shows your current classic retries, and the right column names the window you will be moved to and its exact schedule.
Which window you are moved to depends on your plan. On the Subi and Subi Plus plans you move to the Standard window; on every other plan you move to the Short window, and the comparison tells you that the Standard window comes with the Subi plan. The comparison lists, for each kind of failed payment, the retry days and the email days your store will actually get:
Short window — a temporary decline, like insufficient funds, is retried on Day 1 and Day 3, with emails on Day 0 and Day 3. A card that needs replacing, like an expired card, is not retried; the customer gets one email on Day 0 asking them to update it.
Standard window — a temporary decline is retried on Day 1, 3, 7 and 14, with emails on Day 0, 3, 7 and 14. A card that needs replacing is retried once, on Day 3, and the customer gets one email on Day 0.
Both windows — an authentication rejection or a decline Subi does not recognise is not retried, and the customer gets one email on Day 0. A payment flagged as suspected fraud stops immediately, and you are notified instead of the customer.
If you have turned off Email customers about failed payments, the comparison shows no email days and says no recovery email is sent. It also tells you what happens if a payment keeps failing — by default regular subscriptions and memberships are both paused — and on confirming, Smart payment recovery is switched on with that window, all from that same page.
What happens when a paused subscriber fixes their card
If Smart payment recovery runs out of retries and the subscription is paused, the subscriber can still bring it back. When they update the card on that paused subscription, Subi emails them asking whether to resume it, and shows the same question in their customer portal with a Resume button. Nothing is charged until the subscriber chooses to resume, and the subscription stays paused until then. The email sign-in link is valid for 3 days; the resume offer itself stays open for 30 days in the portal. This email is on by default and you can turn it off or edit it under the customer email notifications (the Card updated on a paused subscription email).
Next steps
Open Retention → Payment recovery to review your recovery window and sender identity, or to switch over from classic recovery. If you have questions or need help choosing a window for your store, contact our support team and we will be glad to help.