Failed Payments and Retries

When a payment fails, MemberZone classifies the failure into one of six categories. The category determines what happens next - most importantly, whether the member is notified.

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Charge Failure Categories

Category	What it means	Member emailed?	Typical cause
Card Declined	The customer's card was rejected by their bank - insufficient funds, fraud hold, expired card, billing-address mismatch, 3D Secure failure, etc.	Yes - automatic email with a payment retry link	Issuer-side decline
Radar Block	Stripe's fraud-detection system (Radar) blocked the charge	No - silent at your discretion	Suspicious payment pattern or flagged IP
Stripe Infrastructure	Temporary platform issue (rate limit, transient API error, network timeout)	No - usually resolves on automatic retry	Stripe-side outage or throttling
Configuration	Your Stripe account, product, or webhook is misconfigured (e.g., account not verified, missing capability)	No - needs operator action, not member	Account setup issue
No card on file	A renewal or first charge came due and the member has no card to charge	Yes - one "add your card" email, no retries	Member activated without a card, or card removed
Unknown	Failure didn't match any known classifier	No	Edge case for investigation

Why doesn't every failure email the customer? Only Card Declined and No card on file are something the member can fix themselves (update or add their card). Other categories indicate problems on Stripe's side or yours, so emailing the member would only confuse them. MemberZone's dashboard action items surface those for you to resolve directly.

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What Happens When a Payment Fails

1. The membership's status changes to Past Due (or Payment Failed for releases that have exhausted retries).
2. Stripe automatically retries on your configured retry schedule (subscription clubs only; release charges are not auto-retried).
3. The failure appears on your dashboard's Needs Your Attention bell as an action item.
4. If the category is Card Declined, the member receives an email with a payment retry link they can use to update their card.
5. The order tied to the failed charge enters Payment Failed status - but inventory remains held until the membership is cancelled, the charge succeeds, or you manually intervene. See Inventory Holds and Blocking Issues for details.

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Retrying Failed Payments

You have two options:

• Automatic retry - Stripe retries failed subscription payments based on your retry schedule. The member's status moves between Active and Past Due as charges fail and retry.
• Manual retry - From the member sidebar → Payments tab, click Retry Payment to immediately attempt the charge again. Useful after the member tells you they've updated their card. You can also open the failed charge on Payments → Transactions and click Retry payment in its sidebar; the button shows while the charge's bill is still outstanding and needs the Manage Billing permission.

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Member Self-Service Retry

Members can also self-serve: the email payment retry link takes them to a dedicated retry page where they can update their card and retry without contacting you. For release charges, this lands on a Release Payment Retry page. For customer-choice subscription cycles, it lands on a Customer Choice Retry page (which also lets them adjust their selections).

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When a Member Adds a Card

A new card does more than sit on file. As soon as a member adds one, whether on a card link you sent or in their own account:

1. It becomes the card their subscription bills. A card the member enters to pay with becomes the default for their subscriptions. A card added any other way only takes over when the current card is missing or can no longer be charged.
2. It pays what they owe. Any subscription renewal still unpaid is charged to the card right away. Once it is paid, the bill is resolved and a pause caused by the failed charge is lifted, so the membership is back to normal without you clicking Retry Payment.
3. The card-on-file indicator updates across every membership the member has with you.

If the new card can't cover the balance (it is declined too), the card is still saved. On the card link page the member sees Amount Still Due with the amount that couldn't be collected, and is asked to check the card details or contact you. The bill stays open, so you can retry it later or ask for another card.

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When a Member Has No Card at Renewal

A renewal that finds no card on file is not retried and doesn't send payment-failed emails, because retrying can't succeed without a card. Instead:

• The membership is put on hold (paused).
• The member gets one email asking them to add a card, with an Add your card link.
• Adding the card charges what they owe and lifts the hold automatically.
• Your contact email gets the daily Members without a card email listing who reached their date without one.

If the card they then add is declined, it becomes an ordinary Card Declined failure and the usual retries start.

Extra charges (upgrades, switches, shipping, overages, top-ups, cancellation fees and paying a bill) are never attempted without a card: they stop with "Add a card first." instead of opening a failed payment. The exception is the shipping charged when you switch an already-paid order to shipping (see below): without a card it goes on the order's past-due balance, so the switch still happens. See Members Without a Card for reminders, the daily email and activating members without a card.

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Past-Due Balance on a Paid Order

Sometimes an order is already paid but money is still owed on it: an item top-up that was declined, or the shipping charged when you switched a paid pickup order to shipping (for example with Ship Unclaimed Pickups) and the card was declined or there was no card on file.

• The order stays paid and fulfillable. It isn't marked Payment Failed, and you can still ship it or hand it over.
• The order's sidebar shows a Past due card for the balance, with three actions:
  • Retry collects only what is still owed (the top-up and any shipping), never the order again. If part succeeds, only the remainder stays owed.
  • Mark Paid records that you collected it another way, such as cash or check. It opens a sidebar ("Mark balance paid externally?") with an optional note for the audit trail.
  • Waive forgives it, in a sidebar ("Waive outstanding balance?") with an optional note for the audit trail. The order stays paid and ready to hand over, and waived shipping isn't charged again when the label is created.
• An order can owe again later. If an order's earlier bill was resolved (for example the release charge failed and was later collected), a new debt on it opens its own past-due balance.

Waiving the bill of an order that was never paid still cancels that order, because the bill is the order's whole payment and cancelling releases its inventory. Before Oct 22, 2026, waiving any order's bill cancelled the order, even a paid one.

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Retry Actions - How Each Failure Routes

Every failed payment in MemberZone is tagged with a retry action that tells the dashboard (and the member portal) exactly how to recover it. You don't have to figure out where to click - the right retry button appears next to the right payment.

Retry Action	Where it shows up	Who can retry it	What it does
Subscription invoice retry	Member portal Payments, your dashboard Payments	Member or staff	Opens the Retry payment sidebar (a panel in the member portal) where the member or staff picks (or adds) a card and the subscription's outstanding invoice is paid.
Release retry	Member portal Payments, the release's Charge Progress modal, your dashboard	Member or staff	Re-runs the release charge for that single member against the saved or newly selected card.
Wine selection upgrade retry	Member portal Payments, member portal membership page	Member only	Takes the member to a dedicated retry page where they can either pay the upgrade amount or adjust their selection back down to the tier's base before retrying. Staff cannot pay an upgrade on behalf of a member because the upgrade represents the member's own selection.
Not retryable	Anywhere a failed payment appears	Nobody	Shown when the underlying invoice or charge is in a terminal state (voided, cancelled, refunded, membership cancelled). Status is informational only - no retry button appears.

The action also carries the remaining amount due and the reason so the UI shows the right dollar figure on the retry button (e.g., "Pay Now $48.00" vs "Retry").

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Member Payments Page - Failed Payment Banner

When a member opens /member/payments, any failed payment with a retryable action surfaces as a yellow banner at the top of the page with a single Pay Now or Retry button. Subscription and release retries open the Retry payment panel; wine-selection upgrade retries navigate to a dedicated page. Members are never asked to figure out which page to visit - the banner routes them automatically.

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Staff-Initiated Retries

From your dashboard:

• Payments tab - every failed payment row exposes its retry action button. Click to open the Retry payment sidebar (the same flow members see in their panel), or jump to the affected release / membership to take broader action (cancel order, change tier, etc.).
• Release Charge Progress modal - the Retry Failed Charges button at the bottom kicks off a single retry run targeting all failed members on the release.
• Member sidebar Payments tab - quick retry against the member's saved card without opening Stripe or another tool.

Staff cannot complete wine-selection upgrade retries on a member's behalf; those have to come from the member.