Payment recovery is all about managing failed payments and declined cards to reclaim lost revenue. In subscription businesses, handling these hiccups smoothly is key to keeping things running without stress.
Loop Subscriptions offers a powerful payment recovery feature built right into the app. Using smart predictive logic, it helps identify potential payment issues before they happen, significantly reducing failed subscriptions.
By automating this process, you can maintain steady cash flow and improve customer retention - all while cutting down on manual work and operational hassle.
Configuring retry settings
Follow these steps to complete the process
Navigate to Loop > Retain > Payment recovery.
This will open the Payment recovery section, where you can configure retry settings, reporting, alerts, and customer communication texts.
Here, you can set key options such as the number of retry attempts for failed payments, whether to notify customers during retries, and the action to take once all retries are exhausted.
Retry settings
In this setting, you configure how many times you want to retry a failed subscription payment. You can also set the number of days between each retry and choose whether or not to notify the customer during the process.
Configure these settings smartly based on your brand’s needs and your subscription frequency. To learn which settings work best for you, reach out to your Loop Success Manager or contact us at contact@loopwork.co.
Backup payments setup
Backup Payment Method is a smart way to recover failed payments by automatically retrying the charge on a secondary card if the primary one fails. This reduces churn and improves recovery rates without needing manual follow-ups. To learn how to enable this feature, how it works, and how both merchants and customers can manage backup cards, check out the article here:
Learn more: Backup payment method
Payment failure notifications
In this setting, you configure when to send the payment failure notification. You get two options here, one to send immediately when the payment fails, or you can select the time range window to send these notifications.
Action after all retries get failed
When configuring retry settings in Loop admin > Retain > Payment recovery, you must choose what happens if every retry attempt is exhausted. You also configure what happens when multiple successive retry cycles complete with payment still failing.
There are three options:
Skip order: The failed billing cycle is skipped and the subscription moves to the next scheduled date. The subscription stays active. Best for merchants who want to preserve the subscriber relationship and try again naturally on the next billing date.
Pause subscription: The subscription is put on hold. The customer must log into the portal to resume, or you can resume it manually from Loop admin. Best for high-value subscriptions where you want to prompt the customer to update their card before the next charge.
Cancel subscription: The subscription is permanently canceled. Use with caution, as this cannot be easily undone. Best suited to low-margin subscriptions where inactive accounts are not worth retaining.
Recommendation: For most merchants, Pause subscription is the best default. It stops revenue loss while preserving the subscriber relationship and gives the customer a clear path to reactivate.
Other settings and alerts
Hard declines behavior: In this setting, you configure retry based on hard decline reasons too & can decide what to do with that subscription. You can either pause the subscription or cancel it.
Future order schedule: Based on your retry settings, if any recurring order falls under the retry configuration of any failed payments, then you can reschedule the upcoming order using this setting. You get to choose the cut-off days from 2 days to infinite days based on your use case & frequency.
Pending payments handling: In this setting, you can handle pending payments that need customer confirmation to be processed. You configure here the days in which this pending payment will be marked as failed & will not be retired again.
To learn which settings work best for your brand & use case, you can get in touch with your Loop success manager or contact us at contact@loopwork.co.
Setting up reporting and alerts
Using this setting, you can send reports at the start of a week or month with a list of payments scheduled.
Customizing customer communication texts
This section lets you personalize the messages your customers see during the payment recovery process. You can update texts for payment method updates, errors, and confirmation prompts to match your brand’s voice and tone.
You can also customize button labels like Update card and place order, Update card, and Add card to make the experience smoother and clearer for your customers.
Personalized communication helps build trust and encourages customers to take timely action, improving payment recovery success.
FAQs
What is dunning or how the payment retry work?
What is dunning or how the payment retry work?
Dunning is the process of handling failed subscription payments, typically caused by issues like expired cards, insufficient funds, or network errors.
When a customer's payment fails (either on the customer's end or the payment provider's end), Loop's built-in dunning feature automatically retries the payment based on the settings you've configured in the Loop Admin Portal. These retries continue on the defined schedule until either:
These retries will continue according to the defined schedule until either:
* The payment is successfully processed, or
* The maximum number of retry attempts is reached.
Once the maximum retries are hit, Loop can take further action based on your settings, for example, pausing or cancelling the subscription.
Is there a way to stop payment retrying for specific subscriptions?
Is there a way to stop payment retrying for specific subscriptions?
To stop payment retries based on specific failure reasons, you can configure a hard stop from the 'Payment Recovery' section.
Does Loop do automatic Network tokenization for expired cards?
Does Loop do automatic Network tokenization for expired cards?
We do not have this feature with us because Loop never stores or updates card details. All subscription payments (including retries and renewals) are processed by Shopify Checkout using the customer’s saved payment method.
Automatic card updates/network tokenisation (sometimes called Account Updater) are provided by:
The payment processor (e.g., Shopify Payments / Stripe)
The card networks (Visa, Mastercard, etc.)
Need help?
No worries - we're here for you!
If you have any questions or need assistance, feel free to email us at support@loopwork.co or chat with us using the support beacon at the bottom right of your screen.
Regards,
Loop Subscriptions Team 🙂