Why Do Subscription Payments Fail?
Subscription payments can fail for several reasons, such as expired credit cards, insufficient funds, or temporary bank issues. To learn more about common causes and solutions, see our Failed Subscription Payments guide.
How Does Payment Recovery (Dunning) Help You?
When a payment attempt fails, Subi’s Payment recovery tool (previously called “Billing management”) steps in to automatically retry the payment, helping you recover revenue and reduce manual follow-up. Here’s how it works:
Automatic Retries: If a customer’s payment fails, the subscription remains active. Subi will retry the payment based on the schedule you set in Payment recovery.
Failure Notifications: By activating failed payment notifications, both you and your customer will be notified as soon as a payment fails, giving you time to resolve the issue (e.g., updating card info).
Customizable Retrial Schedule: You can configure how many times and how often Subi will retry the payment before the next billing cycle.
Successful Retries: If a retry succeeds, an order is automatically created, and no further retries are needed.
Continued Subscription: If all retry attempts fail, the subscription remains active. Subi will try again on the next billing date and will display details of each failed attempt in your dashboard.
Example:
If you set Subi to retry a failed payment three times at two-day intervals, and the second attempt succeeds, an order is created, and no further retries are made. If all three attempts fail, the subscription remains active, and payment will be retried at the next scheduled billing.
How to Enable Payment Recovery in Subi
Open your Subi app panel.
Open Retention > Payment recovery. (If you bookmarked the old Settings > Billing Management location, that link still works and will redirect you to the new page.)
Enable Payment recovery and set your preferred retry schedule (number of attempts and interval between retries).
For nav context, here is where Payment recovery sits in the new Retention hub:
Tip: Make sure failed payment notifications are enabled for both you and your customers to maximize recovery chances.
What Happens in the App?
The Payment recovery page (under Retention) lets you configure retry logic. Merchants on older bookmarks may still know it as “Billing management” in Settings.
The Failed Payments tab in the Subscriptions section shows you which payments are being retried and the result of each attempt.
Each subscription contract displays detailed errors and retry history for failed payments.
(See screenshots below for reference:)
Next Steps
Check out: Subscription Email Notifications in Subi
Learn more: Failed Subscription Payments
Need help?
Feel free to contact our support team. We're here for you anytime:
Live Chat: Message us from within the Subi app or your Shopify Admin
Email: Reach us at [email protected]