Docs / Dunning

Retries

How retries quietly recover failed payments, why their timing matters, and who runs them on your platform.

Recover the payment before you have to involve the customer

A retry is an automatic re-charge of the same card that just failed. It needs nothing from the subscriber, which makes it the cleanest possible recovery. The payment goes through and the subscription continues as if nothing happened.

That's why Churn Buster prioritizes retries. The stretch between a failed payment and the first email is the retry phase, and a campaign tries to resolve the charge quietly in that window before asking anyone to update a card.

On many accounts a real share of failed payments clear this way, often around 15%, before the customer is contacted at all. How much clears depends on why the payments failed.

Diagram of the retry phase, showing automatic retry attempts before a customer is contacted

Not every failure gets retried the same way

A card declined for insufficient funds is a temporary problem worth waiting on. A card reported lost won't clear no matter how many times you try it.

Retries are spaced to the reason for the failure, not fired on a fixed schedule.

Soft declines, like insufficient funds, get spread out to give the balance time to recover.
Hard declines require a lighter touch. Hammering a dead card only risks fraud flags and drags down how the processor handles your other charges.

Who runs the retries depends on your platform

On every platform, Churn Buster owns the customer-facing campaign and sequences it independently of the retries, so emails follow a tested cadence instead of going out once per failed attempt.

What varies is who fires the charge. On some platforms Churn Buster runs the retries directly and can time them to the decline reason. On others the subscription platform owns the retry schedule, and Churn Buster lines its campaign up around it.

Timing retries to the specific decline code is available where Churn Buster runs the retries and the platform reports those codes. Some platforms keep retries on their side or collapse declines into one generic reason, so that routing isn't possible there. We'll confirm what your platform exposes during setup and tune the campaign to it.

Retries keep working past the first week

Recovery doesn't stop when the retry phase ends. Churn Buster keeps retrying across the full length of the campaign, so a charge can still clear on its own weeks after it first failed, often right after the customer's next payday lands money in the account.

Pairing ongoing retries with the email sequence means a payment can recover quietly at any point, and the customer only hears from you when a retry alone won't get there.

Where to go next

Retries are the quiet half of a campaign. The customer-facing half lives in the pages alongside this one.

Emails, the sequence that takes over when a retry alone won't recover the payment.
Card Updates, where a customer with a genuinely dead card goes to fix it.
Last Chance Offers, a final incentive tested near the end of the window.

How retries, email, and the rest of the channels sequence together is covered in Adaptive Campaigns.

You may cancel service with Churn Buster anytime, or as stipulated in your signed service agreement if you have one (non-standard). Please contact support@churnbuster.io to help with your account closing.