Recommended Recharge Settings

This article outlines the Recharge settings we recommend in order for your failed payments recovery process to work optimally with Churn Buster.

Churn Buster is a Premier tech partner at Recharge

Configure Recharge retry settings

  1. Open Recharge Settings > Payment and scroll down to the "Failed charges" section.
  2. Select "Recharge will retry failed payments."
  3. Set retry settings to every 6 days, 8 times max. (Churn Buster enhances retries with adaptive campaigns.)
  4. Select Do nothing when max retries are reached. (Why?)
  5. Save your changes.

These settings ensure that Churn Buster effectively handles the retries and that customers can go through the entire length of the campaign, with passive cancellations still processed through Churn Buster.

Disable Recharge dunning emails

  1. Open Recharge Settings > Notifications.
  2. Disable the Card Declined notification.

NOTE: If using Recharge SMS, turn off all Failed Charge SMS as well.


Why use the "Do Nothing" setting?

Instead of canceling when "CLOSED_MAX_RETRIES_REACHED", the "Do nothing" setting lets customers stay in recovery until the end of the campaign, at which point they are tagged in Recharge as "Passive churn via Churn Buster."

This setting is important to ensure customers aren’t canceled prematurely and gives you more control over passive cancellations. By default, Churn Buster cancels a subscription if a customer gets to the end of the campaign without a successful recovery.

When transitioning to Churn Buster (during the first 1-2 months), you may see a drop in passive cancellations followed by a temporary spike - as customers who would have been canceled earlier (in your previous setup) have been delayed until they reach the end of their Churn Buster campaign.

Note: The cancellation setting can be turned on/off by request.

  • Some merchants choose to not passively cancel subscriptions in order to account for pending revenue for reporting.
  • Most merchants passively cancel subscriptions to keep the charge error list clean and to give a more accurate reflection of subscription revenue and count.