Overview

Required plan

This feature or setting is available to all customers on any Recurly subscription plan.

Prerequisites

• An active Recurly account in production mode.
• Recurring credit card payment setup.
• Access to the Recurly dashboard and configurations.

Limitations

• Not applicable for hard declines.
• Retries will cease after 7 transaction declines, 20 total transaction attempts, or 60 days since the invoice creation unless dunning settings complete earlier.

Definition

Recurly's Static Retries does not use machine learning, but rather a specific set of criteria given signals from our gateway partners such as decline codes and merchant advice codes on renewals.

Key benefits

• Reduced subscriber churn: Minimizes disruptions and involuntary subscriber churn.
• Compliant logic: Tailors retry schedules to maximize the opportunity of success.
• Comprehensive coverage: Works alongside other revenue recovery strategies such as Dunning.

Recurly's static retry logic

Recurly's static retry logic uses gateway signals and regulatory compliance signals from the transaction to increase the chances of successful payments. This helps keep your customers' subscriptions active and reduces the chance of losing them due to payment issues.

Our status retry logic does not use machine learning while also increasing the likelihood of successful transactions. If you are interested in further optimizations, see our documentation on Intelligent Retries.

General retry guidelines

Soft declines

Soft declines, which occur for reasons like insufficient funds or temporary holds, are not final. Recurly's retry strategy uses gateway signals for retry eligibility (soft declines), and set criteria for retries using the same payment method. On a set schedule, the payment will retry until the static number of retries is exhausted or dunning ends, whichever comes first.

Hard declines

While hard declines typically aren't retried for compliance and regulatory reasons, there are exceptions:

• Exception A: Immediate retry if Account Updater or the customer updates billing information.
• Exception B: Change from hard to soft decline during dunning after billing information update.
• Exception C: Manual forced collection outside the typical recurring schedule.

Handling gateway payment errors

Different gateway errors have specific retry schedules:

• Try Again/Gateway Error: Every 2 days.
• Issuer or Processor Unavailable: Every 3 days.
• Communication/Configuration Error: Initial retries up to 2 times, 4 hours apart, followed by 6 retries, 1 day apart, and finally retries through the end of the dunning cycle, 3 days apart.

Manual retry and forced collection

For more control, you can initiate a forced collection attempt by clicking the Attempt Collection Now button on a pending or past due invoice's details page. However, excessive manual retries might exhaust the allowed transaction count for automated retries. This function is also available via API. Talk to your gateway account manager or acquirer about this process so that you're well informed about Network retry abuse fees and other risks associated with retrying hard declines.

Direct debit payments

Recurly currently supports automatic payment retries for most direct debit methods such as ACH and SEPA, when the response from the bank is due to insufficient funds, or an applicable response code. For situations that may require a retry, such as an invoice correction or update, manual retries are possible and can be executed through the Admin Console or via Recurly’s APIs.

Recurly has implemented a feature to automatically retry Direct Debit payments. Read more on the Direct Debit Retries page.

Specialized Retry strategies

Recurly supports specialized payment retries for certain APMs where necessary, including UPI AutoPay, Pix Automatico, and Mercado Pago. There is no configuration for these payment methods to initiate retries, and are available automatically.

UPI AutoPay

UPI AutoPay retries must be completed on the same day as the initial failure, and will reattempt up to 2 times in the hours after the initial failure. After 2 attempts, the invoice will be marked failed and the subscription will be handled based on the dunning settings in your configuration. UPI AutoPay does not support manual force collections.

Pix Automatico

Pix Automatico retries must be completed within the same billing period as the initial failure, and will reattempt up to 1-3 times in the days after the initial failure. Since Pix Automatico retries must complete within the same billing period as the initial renewal transaction, for shorter billing periods such as weekly, only one retry may attempt. For billing periods longer than one week, the full retry schedule should complete properly. Pix Automatico does not support manual force collections.

Mercado Pago

Mercado Pago retries will reattempt up to 3 timesafter the initial failure with 24 hour waiting period between each failure, resulting in a single attempt per day after initial failure. Mercado Pago does not support manual force collections.