We are having issues where customers are attempting to cancel their subscription after their payment failed. But since the payment was attempted and failed, it continues to retry for up to 30 days, resulting in a very confusing customer experience: They get an email that their payment failed and subscription entered a grace period, then they get an email that they are expired since their payment continued to fail, and then much later the payment succeeds, even if they’ve tried to cancel. How can we prevent that? Is there a way to stop payment retries when the customer takes an action to cancel?
Question
Can a customer cancel after a billing failure to prevent Stripe from retrying payments?
+5This post has been closed for comments
+6Hey
This is actually by design with RevenueCat Web Billing and there's no option to stop payment retries as of now - but I can definitely see what you mean about the confusing customer experience, and I will pass this feedback to the team.
In case you haven't come across it, here's the relevant section of our subscription lifecycle docs that explains the billing retry behavior with more detail: https://www.revenuecat.com/docs/web/web-billing/subscription-lifecycle#billing-retry
The key points being (as you also noted):
- when a renewal payment fails, RevenueCat will automatically retry charging the customer's payment method for up to 30 days
- the subscription is marked as cancelled immediately upon failure, but retries continue in the background
- if payment is recovered at any point during those 30 days, the subscription will automatically renew
If one of the retry attempts is successful, RevenueCat will renew the subscription and generate a
RENEWALevent. Unless the subscription was still in a grace period, the new billing cycle will start on the date that the payment was successfully recovered.
Thank you for sharing this, I will pass it on and let you know when I have any updates.
+6Hey
Following up on the above report, as we are looking for a possible edge case on our side, could I ask for a specific example of a User ID that found themselves is that situation? Also, to clarify a bit further, when you say that the user “tried to cancel”, could you elaborate on their action specifically?
Meaning, did the payment fail on the card (e.g temporary card expired, not enough funds, etc) first or did they actively remove the card in hopes that it would stop the subscription? Asking as the customer could go to the Customer Portal and click Cancel Subscription and this should immediately expire the subscription, and no further charge retries would be attempted. Did they do that? Any extra details around this flow would be helpful to try and understand better.
Feel free to share it via a private message or even open a Support Ticket and link this thread with myself, so we can follow up internally.
Thanks in advance,
Enter your E-mail address. We'll send you an e-mail with instructions to reset your password.