Card declines and order errors

When you have a customer with an error in the status, you can see more details for this error by checking the Orders section. You will have three tabs, Processed, Upcoming and Charge Errors. If you click the last one, you will see a table with all the order errors in the last column. If you hover over, the tooltip text will share more details about the cause.

Understand card declines

Cards can be declined for a variety of reasons that depend upon the customer's bank or credit card. If a customer gets a card decline error, they will get an automatic email asking them to update the card. Card declines are flagged by the cardholder's institution. These banks never share with us the detailed information on the reason for these declines. Most often the situation is that the bank didn't recognize the company and as a precaution flagged the charge anyway in hopes that the cardholder will contact them in the event that this was not in error.

The only way to find out more detailed information about why a payment was declined is to ask your customer to get in touch with their bank to confirm the reason for the decline. If a customer periodically gets card decline errors even after updating, likely the customer should contact their bank to figure out what's going on. At that point , there's usually something specific to their account that is blocking transactions from happening.

Set up automatic retry settings

By default, the system will also retry the error charges the day after the order initially errors, and then on 6-day intervals up to 60 days. However, you can adjust your retry logic to retry card declines at your preferred interval. 

To adjust your automatic retry logic:

1. In the Recharge Dashboard, click the wrench icon and select Payment (General). 
2. Under Failed charges, select Recharge will retry failed charges.
3. From the Retry charge interval dropdown, select the interval between each retry attempt. 
4. Under Maximum number of retries, select the number of retry attempts that should occur before the system stops retrying the charge. 
5. Click Save.

Handle max retry orders

If an order is still declined after the last retry attempt, it will be marked as Closed/Max Retries Limit Reached. You can view the errored charges by clicking Orders in the Recharge Dashboard and selecting the Errors tab. 

You can specify how Recharge will handle orders after the last retry attempt. For more information, visit Understanding max retry errors.

Understand the dunning process

Customers will receive the Card declined email the first time the card declines and the order cannot be processed. However, the Card declined notification will not go out after every retry attempt. Instead, it will go out after any attempt following a seven day period after the last notification was sent out. 

For example, if you set your retry logic to retry a failed charge every 5 days, an initial Card declined email will go out on the 1st day. The next retry attempt will occur on the 6th day, but since a card decline notification went out within the last 7 days, no email will be sent to the customer. However, on the next retry attempt on the 11th day, a card decline notification will be sent to the customer. 

Customize the Card declined notification

When a customer gets a card error, the system sends an email with a link to update their card. You can make adjustments to the content of the notification:

1. In the Recharge Dashboard, click the wrench icon.
2. Select Notifications.
3. Under Customer Notifications, click on Card declined.
4. Make adjustments to the notification in the textboxes. You can also use variables in your notifications.
5. When finished, click Save.

Reach out to your payment processor

For more information on failed charges, declined charges, and fraud filters it is best to reach out to your specific payment processor.

• Shopify Payments: Troubleshoot Shopify Payments
• Stripe: Understanding declines and failed payments
• Braintree: Transactions - Declines
• Authorize.net: Why was my transaction declined?

Common error messages

If a customer gets a card decline error, they will get an automatic email asking them to update the card. As the storeowner, you get additional details with an error message so you can be proactive.

Fixing removed variants

If you delete a product or variant in your store that customers are still subscribed to, it will cause the error Variant removed from Shopify or Variant removed from BigCommerce. This can also happen if you change your variant options - existing customers that point to the old variant ID will not have orders generated.

To deal with these errors individually, you can swap to the current version of the product. If you have more than 50 to update, contact Recharge Support for help with a bulk update. In order to perform this bulk update, support will need some information from you.

Update the Purchase Items Export CSV

1. Download the Purchase Items Export CSV from Exports > Subscription Exports. If you are part of the Export Builder beta, please use the Old Exports.
2. Create four new columns in the download and label them as follows:
   • NEW Product Title
   • NEW Variant Title
   • NEW Product ID
   • NEW Variant ID
3. Fill in the appropriate data in these new columns for your existing subscriptions.

Note that when changing the ID and title, this will not update other product attributes. If you do need to adjust other attributes, such as price, let support know and they can advise on the other columns or exports you will need to include.

Once you've completed this, send the CSV file to support along with the correct number of rows that should be changed, and support will perform the bulk update process on their end. Please note that this needs to be sent at least five days in advance.