What is phased retry?
When a subscription payment fails, Appstle automatically tries the payment again on a schedule before giving up. This is called dunning, and it is how Appstle recovers payments that fail for temporary reasons such as an expired card or a momentary bank decline.
Phased retry lets that schedule work in stages instead of one fixed cadence. You can retry quickly in the first few days, then space the attempts further apart, so you recover more payments without over-messaging your customers.
It builds on the recovery settings already on your Dunning Management page. Those simple settings use one retry count and one fixed gap between attempts. Phased retry replaces that single cadence with an ordered set of phases, each with its own number of attempts and its own spacing.
How a phase works
Each phase has two settings:
Attempts — how many times to retry the payment during this phase.
Interval (days) — how many days to wait between attempts in this phase.
Phases run in order. Appstle works through the first phase’s attempts, then moves to the next phase, and so on, until the payment succeeds or every attempt has been used.
An example
Say you set up two phases:
Phase 1 — 2 attempts, 1 day apart (retry quickly, while the failure is likely temporary).
Phase 2 — 3 attempts, 5 days apart (give the customer time to update their payment method).
Appstle retries on day 1 and day 2, then — if the payment is still unpaid — again on day 7, day 12, and day 17. That is 5 attempts in total: front-loaded early, then spaced out, instead of five evenly spaced tries.
When all retries are used up
If every attempt fails, Appstle applies the final action you have chosen on the Dunning Management page — cancel the subscription, pause it, or skip the failed order and keep the subscription active. Phased retry does not change that choice; it only changes how the retries leading up to it are scheduled.
What stays the same
Your customers continue to receive the same failed-payment notifications you already use.
If no phases are set up, your store keeps using the simple recovery settings exactly as before — nothing changes.
Your final action (cancel, pause, or skip) is unchanged.
Measuring results
Open the Results tab on the Dunning Management page to see how recovery is performing — recovery rate, recovered revenue, how many subscriptions are still in dunning, and which decline reasons are most common. Use it to compare performance before and after you adjust your retry schedule.
Availability
Phased retry is an advanced recovery capability. If you would like to shape your retry schedule into phases for your store, reach out to Appstle support and our team will help you set it up and choose a schedule that fits your customers.