vanix

Vanix admin

Billing recovery

Billing recovery decides what happens when a renewal can't be charged. Go to Billing Recovery to set it up. Both halves are off until you turn them on.

Two kinds of failure

  • Failed payment recovery is for declined cards. The customer is the one who can fix it, so this is where telling them matters most. It starts as 4 attempts: 1 day after the failure, then 2 days after each attempt.
  • Failed inventory recovery is for renewals that can't be filled because an item is out of stock. Restocking is your job, so these start longer and further apart: 3 attempts, after 2, 3 and 5 days.

The retry schedule

Each attempt waits a set time after the one before it. Choose Add an attempt to add more, or the remove icon to drop one. A schedule needs at least one attempt.

Editing a schedule never changes a recovery that's already running.

When every attempt has failed

  • Pause the subscription. Billing stops and the customer keeps the subscription. You can resume it later. This is where declined cards start.
  • Skip this cycle and carry on. Nothing is charged for this cycle, and the next one bills normally. This is where out-of-stock starts.
  • Cancel the subscription. It's closed in Shopify, and this can't be undone.
  • Stop billing and flag it for review. Nothing is charged and nothing changes in Shopify. It waits for you.

If you choose cancel, Vanix tells you how long after the first failure that happens. A card that fails a few times in a week is usually one expired card, not a customer who left, so give the attempts longer waits if you cancel at the end.

If a retry succeeds

  • Keep the original billing day, or
  • Move the billing day to the day it recovered.

Notifications

Under Channels, switch on the ways recovery can reach people. Then choose which channels each attempt, and the end of the sequence, uses.

  • Shopify payment method update email: sends the customer Shopify's email with a link to update their payment method. Used on retries of declined cards.
  • Webhook: sends an event to a URL of yours, such as your email platform or helpdesk, on each retry and when the sequence ends. You can add as many endpoints as you need. Each one has its own signing secret: requests carry an X-Subscriptions-Signature header, an HMAC-SHA256 of the body, so you can check they came from Vanix.

Retries still run if no channel is switched on. Nothing is sent, that's all.

What customers see

While a renewal is being retried, the customer's subscription page says what failed and when the next try is, for example "Attempt 2 of 4". When a declined card stops billing, it shows an Update payment method button. Customer portal