Failed Renewals on the Cratejoy Marketplace
When a subscription gets to the end of its term and is set to renew, our system will automatically re-bill the customer, charge their card, create a new order, and extend the subscription for another term.
There are times, however, that this automatic renewal process might fail, including due to...
- Expired credit card
- Cancelled credit card
- Insufficient funds/Low balance
- Anti-fraud protection
- Bank decline
If the charge was not successful, the subscription is put into Past Due status to indicate there was an issue.
Recovering Failed Renewals
Cratejoy provides you with several tools to successfully recover as much revenue as possible from past due subscriptions.
Retry Past Due Customers.
Cratejoy will try charging a Past Due subscription up to 5 times over 10 days. In some cases, charging the customer multiple times after a few days will make the charge succeed. This is commonly the case if the customer had insufficient funds or a low balance at the time of the first billing attempt.
Sending Customers Failed Renewal Notices
Cratejoy’s failed renewal notification send to customers after each failed renewal attempt. In some cases, the customer may need to take action to resolve the issue (e.g. if the card has expired). These email notifications can help spur the customer to update their card information in their account.
If the transaction has not gone through successfully, the subscription will be marked as expired, and no additional attempts to charge the customer will be made.
Identifying Past Due Subscriptions
From the Merchant Portal, go to the Subscriptions page, and filter under Subscription Status for past Due Subscriptions.
On an individual subscription that is Past Due, you can also see how many more tries we have remaining before the subscription expires.
Best Practices for Recovering Revenue
Retry cards intelligently - Cratejoy takes care of this for you! Cratejoy’s retry schedule will charge the customer 5 times over 10 days (Day 2, 4, 6, 8, & 10).
Cratejoy's optimized retry schedule recovers, on average, an additional 5-6% of revenue each renewal cycle.
Use your renewal failure email notification. - Cratejoy takes care of this for you as well. Merchants that have enabled our renewal failure email notification see, on average, 2x more revenue recovered than merchants who have not enabled that email. Repetition works!
Customize your renewal failure email notification for your store and your customers. . A great renewal failure email notification is:
- Actionable. Prompt your subscriber to update their card information!
- Clear. Have a strong, clear subject line.
- On brand. Cratejoy provides a default template, but make sure it’s in your own brand’s voice.
- Tempting. Talk to your subscribers about what they’re missing out on if they don’t update their payment information.
Consider a post-expiration drip campaign strategy. Expired customers can always reactivate their subscriptions. Consider drip email campaigns with MailChimp targeted towards these expired subscribers.
Updated by Dre 10/9/23