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Question

Huge "Payment Declined" Rate on Google Play Store

  • 5 September 2024
  • 1 reply
  • 8 views

Hello,

We have a huge rate of “Payment Pending”, “Payment Decline”, and “Canceled” on our subscriptions in Google Play Store, after the end of one-week trial.

We tried contacting Google several times, but they say everything is normal and don’t give us any helpful answer. :-/

Since some of the payments go through, we believe it shouldn’t be a general technical issue. So, we are wondering if anyone has any idea, thoughts, or experience that can help us.

 

Here is one page of our “Order management.” We have 8 pages like this in August.

 

 

 

Further Notes:

  • We are in the US, and running Google Ads in the US. (Most these users are US-Based.)
  • We have a registered LLC in California, operate in California, have got a D-U-N-S number and Tax Registration numbers and we have put all of them in the Developer profile and Google has validated them.
  • We tried switching from $59.99/yr to $7.99/mo (with one week trial) to reduce the transaction amount, but we still see a lot of these Payment Pending/Declined/Canceled items.

1 reply

wes_clark
Rank
Userlevel 3
Badge +5

Hi! Since RevenueCat isn't a payment processor, we don't have many specific details about the issue with collecting the payment -- we just know that the store is reporting that the user's payment failed. I do want to say that we tend to see high trial/renewal churn on Android in general. In our experience, 50–60% is about average, and (anecdotally) less than 30-40% is very uncommon on the low end. I also would like to mention that, as of recently, we believe that there has been an increase in billing issues as a result of users using fake/empty cards in order to access trials.

In terms of what to do about it, one option would be that you implement a campaign in the app where, if a subscriber has a trial in a billing retry state, they... 

  1. Receive a push notification instructing them to update their payment details
  2. Or receive an in-app message recommending the same
  3. And then ideally have that in-app message include a CTA directing the subscriber right to the Play Store to update that information so you don’t lose customers in the “funnel” from the app to that page.

 

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