This article will guide merchants through understanding the Retry feature for Automated Recurring Billing.

What is Recurring Billing Automatic Retry?

Automatic Retry is a feature that enhances Recurring Billing by automatically attempting to collect failed payments, eliminating the need for manual collection. With Automatic Retry, your customer's subscriptions will not terminate due to payment failures. Instead, they will remain in a suspended status until the subscription's payment details are updated. Once updated, the subscription will automatically retry the failed payment.

How to enable Automatic Retry?

To enable this feature, navigate to the Recurring Billing page under Tools and click on "Enable Automatic Retry" under Settings.

Please note that once you enable Automatic Retry, you cannot disable it. If you are unsure whether this feature may disrupt your current Recurring Billing integration, it is strongly recommended that you contact your software provider/developer before enabling this feature.

If I don't want to use the Recurring Billing Retry feature, do I need to do anything to opt-out?

No, you don't. If you receive any notifications about this feature, it will only be to inform you of its availability. If you wish to use our Recurring Billing service, you are not required to opt-in to the Retry feature.

Do failed payments that cause the subscription to be suspended count against the scheduled payment occurrences?

No, they do not. If a scheduled Recurring Billing transaction fails and causes the subscription to be suspended, the failed payment will not count against the total number of scheduled payments within the subscription. Only successfully authorized transactions will count against the occurrence schedule of Recurring Billing subscriptions.

What action should I take when a subscription fails?

If the first payment of the subscription declines, the ARB will prompt for a revised start date. This new date will act as the new start date, and the failed transaction will not be re-run. If a subscription is suspended due to a failed transaction, you will need to un-suspend the subscription by updating it appropriately to reactivate it. This action will place the subscription in the queue for the next day's Recurring Billing run, regardless of the scheduled interval. If the next day's Recurring Billing transaction fails again, the process described above restarts, placing the subscription back into a suspended state without counting against the scheduled occurrences within the subscription. Please note that if the subscription is not reactivated before the next interval payment date, Retry will not bill twice to compensate for the missed interval payment during the suspension. It will simply continue counting down the occurrences for each successful transaction.