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Why my customer wasn't charged?

Sometimes you'll get confused on why the customer wasn't charged when you thought they should. There are some common misunderstandings of certain features/situations that can lead to customers not being charged. This article will list some common ones.

Subscription is a gift subscription

The most common occurrence is when a customer has purchased a gift subscription that is set to start at some date in the future!

This is an option with gift subscriptions which are presented to the customer on checkouts and they are able to set a future date when it should occur and the number of shipments for the duration of the total subscription! In that case, the customer's profile will get created and you will be able to see their sub as active and running, but there will be no associated order until the date specified is reached!

You'll also see a couple of tags like "Gift subscription" and "Not started" which are crucial to separating them from regular subscriptions. When this is present, simply check the renewal date specified on their profile in the admin, as this will be the starting date and when they will be initially charged!

Learn more about gifting here.

The customer's credit card was declined

This one is not as common but can occur from time to time as well.

In this case, there are issues blocking the payment and this is always related to the payment method the customer has on file! Most of the time, it's due to lacking funds or some similar issue, and Stripe issues decline codes which give some context to these if you need to follow up with the customer or simply stay informed about it.

You can always check the reasoning behind it in the transactions section by hovering over the Failed label as in the image below

​Find out more on how you can handle customer invoices here.

Your product is out of stock

If you didn't void a customer's payment, but he is not being charged, most probably is because your product is out of stock.

Our system will automatically void the payment of your customer and not let you charge him because the product that the customer wants is no longer available. And you will be able to find these events in the customer's profile timeline.

If that's the case, you would need to update the stock on your inventory. And if the number of stock is above 0, your customer will be charged as usual at the next renewal date.

If you don't have that product available anymore, please, contact your customer and let him/her know to change their preferences in the survey if applicable.

Stripe rules blocked your customers' payments

There are times when your customers may have financial difficulties, and this can cause the payment to not go through because their credit cards do not have enough funds. You will be able to see this information inside your customer's account in the customer section.

That's why Subbly has a dunning tool for you. Dunning tool will retry to make the corresponding charges in your place.

However, you may come across the following situation, where the payment was declined because the transaction was considered high risk. Note how the label says Blocked, instead of simply Failed.

Whenever you see that the payment is Blocked, Stripe rules are the ones blocking the payment, and it's not necessarily failing.

This can happen due to the rules you have in your Stripe account. In order to solve this situation, you just need to change your Stripe rules so that the following payments can be processed without any problem.

Lean on this Stripe article, which contains more information on the subject and teaches how to change the rules, or contact Stripe support.
Learn more about Subbly dunning tool.

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