Cards expire, get replaced after fraud, and get cancelled when someone leaves. Failed renewals are routine traffic in any store with subscriptions, not a sign something is broken.
What happens automatically
- The renewal charge is attempted and declined.
- The unpaid renewal order appears in Accounts Receivable.
- The charge is retried on your schedule — by default 3 days later, then 7 days after that.
- If you set a suspend threshold, the subscription is suspended after that many failures. Left blank, it never suspends on its own.
The schedule lives in Settings → Failed payments and applies to the whole store.
Choosing a retry schedule
| Schedule | Suits |
|---|---|
| 3 then 7 days | The default. Long enough for a replacement card to arrive, short enough to catch the month. |
| 1 then 3 then 7 | Higher volume stores where a fast retry catches temporary declines. |
| Retries off | Only where you collect manually and would rather chase by phone. |
Suspension
A suspend threshold stops a subscription after that many failures. It is blank by default, and most networks leave it that way — you would usually rather chase a tribe than cut off their service over an expired card.
Set it where the thing being sold costs you money to keep supplying, and where cutting it off is a proportionate response. Tell the network the rule exists before you turn it on.
The actual fix
Almost always new card details. Send a card request from Accounts Receivable — the tribe gets a secure link, enters the details themselves, and the next retry succeeds. Nobody reads a card number aloud and your team never handles it.
Getting ahead of it
The dashboard tile Will be billed, no card lists tribes due to renew with nothing saved to charge. Everything on it is a failure that has not happened yet. Clearing that tile weekly prevents more failures than any retry schedule.