Stripe : Failed Recurring Payments

Question

We are a small start-up business that started about two months ago. We use Stripe as the primary payment processor along with PayPal as the secondary option.

Our plans are monthly subscriptions ranging from $5 to $25 per month. Our payment form currently collects the user's Name, CC, Expiration Date and the CVC security code.

After the first month, we started noticing that the recurring payments of users started failing on Stripe. We have no idea why this would be happening. If the first payment went through, why would future subscription payments fail? So far, every third recurring payment is failing for us on Stripe.

We contacted Stripe regarding this issue a few times but keep receiving responses that are straight off of their documentation and help guides. We need professional and experienced advice on this matter.

One thing we keep asking ourselves is whether we should additionally also collect the full billing address data.

Any advice on this is greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

If the first payment went through, why would future subscription payments fail?

For the same reason that charges ever fail: The card expired, the card was reported stolen, the account is closed, the customer's overdrafted their account, the customer's exceeded their credit line, the issuing bank had an extended outage...

Depending on what you're offering, you could be getting a substantial amount of fraudulent users that are getting caught a couple billing cycles down the line.

Any available information about the decline is returned via webhooks. That would be the first place to look for any further details. (Banks are not necessarily forthcoming, so "declined" may be the extent of the information available.)

Given how widespread this seems to be for you, yes, I might recommend collecting full address information and refusing any transaction that fails AVS.

At a minimum, you might want to request the customer's ZIP code and perform AVS checks against that.