We have seen the number of online transactions increasing rapidly, we have also seen the number of subscription businesses also increasing. The number of failed transactions are also on a rise:

Rise in Transaction Failures

Source: http://blog.spreedly.com/2013/04/25/examining-payment-gateways-and-failed-transactions/#.U2DCEvmSw_6

If you are manually taking care of all the failed transactions then you might want to stop and think if you would really want to go on spending more time on it when you can automate the retry process. It is said that retrying to charge the card multiple times, there is a chance to recover 70-80% of the failed transactions. So basically you not only save time but also regain a high percentage of the failed transactions.

That’s why dunning (Dunning is when you attempt to capture the payments on invoices that are due) becomes so important in subscription billing.

With Chargebee Dunning, you can:

  • Automate retry of payments
  • Configure payment retry settings
  • Automate notification alerts
  • Automate email notifications
  • Customize email templates

So, how do you configure this with ChargeBee?

When a customer’s payment fails, you can configure email notifications settings letting the customers know that the transaction has failed:

Payment failed

For the Dunning settings, go to: Settings > under Site Settings > Retry Setting

Dunning settings

Here you have the option to retry after 1, 3, 5, and 7 days. After which you can either mark as unpaid or cancel the subscription.

With the time you would be saving, and recovering the failed transactions I think that does without saying that having a dunning management system has become a necessity for online subscription businesses. So when the pros clearly outweigh the cons, are you still manually keeping track of your failed transactions?