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Understanding Payment Retries, Cancellations, and Pauses in Stripe

This guide will walk you through how to manage your subscription payments, retries, and cancellations when using Stripe's Integration

Shelby from Ivorey™ avatar
Written by Shelby from Ivorey™
Updated today

It’s important to understand these settings, as they directly impact your business operations and customer experience if you offer subscriptions or payment plans and use Stripe as your provider alongside Ivorey™

The Key Distinction: Ivorey™ vs. Stripe

When you use Stripe for subscriptions, failed payment management and customer notifications are handled directly within the Stripe Dashboard, not through Ivorey’s native features.

Ivorey’s "Manage failed payments for subscriptions" settings in the Payments tab are only applicable if you use NMI, Square, or Authorize.net as your payment provider.


Configuring And Viewing Failed Payment Retries in Stripe

You have full control over the retry schedule and customer notifications directly in your Stripe settings

Accessing the Settings

  1. Log in to your Stripe account.

  2. Navigate to Settings > Subscriptions and emails.

How to set Payment Retries in Ivorey™


While Ivorey does not natively support Stripe, it can set up a basic retry trigger in your account to re-try the payment if the customer's card is on file or the payment plan is in place already.

To Set this up, access Payments > Settings > Subscriptions and ensure your payment retries are set up and the button to automatically send invoices is selected.

This should match the retries seen in your stripe account for this customer.

Managing Retries

You can configure Smart Retries, which use machine learning to optimise the timing of payment attempts, or you can manually set a custom retry schedule.

For recurring invoices, you can enable auto-payments when sending the invoice (toggle the auto-pay option).

This will automatically charge the customer’s saved card or bank account on scheduled dates. For payment plans, each installment has a due date and sends a reminder notification if not paid.

Communicating with Customers

Customers receive notifications about failed payments and the generated invoice. If they pay before the next retry, the retry process stops automatically.

Also, they can pay using an existing or new payment method. If a new card is used, it becomes the default for future payments.

You can enable and customise automated customer email notifications for failed payments directly from within Stripe’s settings - this is in addition to any automations, workflows or reminders in Ivorey™ which are already sent from your account.

You can view the emails going to the contacts to check they got their invoice or payment reminder by clicking on the conversation thread and finding the email, and confirming it was received/sent.

Communication from Stripe about payment retries is transactional, and separate from marketing- or reminder-based workflows in Ivorey™



Pausing and Canceling Subscriptions

Once a subscription is created, you have the ability to manage its status in Stripe.

Canceling Subscriptions

  • Subscriptions can be manually canceled from your Stripe dashboard or automatically canceled after a series of failed payment retries.

  • When a subscription is canceled in Stripe, this change automatically syncs and shows as canceled in Ivorey.

Resuming Canceled Subscriptions

  • A canceled subscription cannot be resumed directly within the Ivorey™ platform.

  • To get a client back on a subscription, you must create a new payment plan, or invoice, for them, which features the subscription, or manually re-enter them into a workflow which includes set up of a payment plan.

Troubleshooting

It's not retrying three times but the subscription was cancelled and I don't have this toggled on - why is this occurring?

Sometimes, Failed Transaction may not retry 3x, despite the settings set is to retry 3x, and these settings "If all retries for a payment fail, cancel subscription" is disabled. It still cancel the subscription. This happens as Stripe is not supported by default by our automatic re-try functionality.

If this happens, please re-enrol them via Stripe: To re-enroll your canceled leads, there should be an option in Stripe under Subscriptions.

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