Failed payment recovery for Shopify
By Sean Weas · Co-Founder, Product & EngineeringReviewed by Jay StevensUpdated 3 min readQuick answer
Shopify Subscriptions retries a failed subscription payment on a schedule you configure (the number of attempts, the days between, and the final action — skip, pause, or cancel) and sends standard email notifications. Its native dunning is widely described as intentionally basic: email-only, uniform timing, no card account updater. Email-only dunning recovers ~20%; human outreach gets 60–85%+. Revatto re-attempts the charge through Shopify's Subscription Contracts API on an AI-timed schedule and adds email + SMS + human outreach under your brand, done for you — 20% of the first recovered payment, $0 setup, $0 monthly, cancel anytime.
The gap Shopify leaves open
What Shopify recovers on its own
- Shopify Subscriptions lets you configure the number of billing-attempt retries, the days between them, and the final action (skip / pause / cancel).
- Automated subscription emails notify the customer of a failed payment with a link to update their card.
- Shopify doesn't publish a default retry count — it's merchant-configured, and its native dunning is widely described as intentionally basic.
- Capture runs through the store's subscription-capable gateway, typically Shopify Payments.
stops at
adds- Shopify stops at: Shopify Subscriptions' native dunning is intentionally basic — uniform retries and standard emails.Revatto adds: AI-timed billing attempts plus email + SMS + human outreach on top.
- Shopify stops at: Customer notifications are email-only — no SMS and no human follow-up.Revatto adds: Multi-channel outreach under your brand, not a single templated email.
- Shopify stops at: There's no native card account updater — expired cards rely on the customer self-serving.Revatto adds: Revatto drives the update with sequenced human follow-up, then re-attempts the billing.
- Shopify stops at: Once the retries exhaust, the contract just skips, pauses, or cancels — no win-back.Revatto adds: Recovery continues past Shopify's last attempt to actually reconnect the customer.
How Revatto recovers failed Shopify payments
- 1Detect the failureRevatto ingests Shopify's subscription billing-attempt failure webhook the moment a contract charge fails.
- 2Enrich the contractA Subscription Contracts query fills in the customer, pricing, and payment-method context Shopify's sparse webhook leaves out.
- 3Re-attempt on an AI-timed scheduleWhere a retry can clear it, Revatto creates a new billing attempt through Shopify's Subscription Contracts API — timed for recovery, not Shopify's uniform interval.
- 4Reach the customerEmail + SMS + a human recovery specialist reach the customer under your brand to update the card — the channels Shopify's email-only dunning doesn't cover.
- 5Stop on successShopify's billing-attempt success webhook ends the sequence automatically.
How a Shopify decline maps across stacks
Insufficient funds — ISO 51 (a soft decline worth re-attempting). Recovery looks the same across every stack Revatto runs on — here is how the same issuer decision is named on each.
See what Revatto would recover from Shopify
Failed payments recovered automatically — no engineering, no manual chasing. We do the work; you keep the revenue.