Shopify Subscription recurring payment - Card Declined Process for Ongoing™️
Written by Adriana Giancarla
Updated Nov 5, 2026 2 min read
Ongoing is devoted to capturing payments for you automatically so we send out an email to the customer every time the card is declined, reminding them update it, and we also attempt to bill them a couple times in a row.
If your customer's payment was declined, there is a process for handling this.
The Ongoing app will automatically try to charge your customer again (for a total of 3x).
Ongoing waits 24 hours between each billing attempt.
Ongoing defaults to 3 total billing attempts (this can be adjusted on Settings).
The customer is able to update their payment information at any time from the customer portal.
How a merchant can send their customer a link to update payment information
How customer can update their payment information in the customer portal
DUNNING MANAGEMENT PROCESS
If the first billing attempt was declined payment, then Ongoing attempts to charge the customer again 24 hours later (2nd Billing attempt)
If the 2nd billing attempt was successful, then the customers paid successfully & a subscription order is created.
If the 2nd billing attempt is declined, Ongoing attempts to charge the customer again 24 hours later (3rd Billing attempt).
If the 3rd billing attempt was successful, then the customers paid successfully & a subscription order is created.
If the 3rd billing attempt is declined, Ongoing sets the status of the subscription contract to Failed.
Failed Status
The "Failed" status means the customer's payment was declined the max # of times & essentially deactivates the subscription.
The merchant will be notified if the customer's account has been changed to Failed.
Reactivating Subscription after updating Payment Information
With a Failed status, the customer still has the opportunity to update their payment information and set the status back to Active on the customer portal.
This will restart the billing attempts from scratch.
Alternatively, the merchant can also set the status back to Active for the customer.
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- Shopify Update: Payment Methods Removed After Subscription Cancellation
- How to Update a Customer’s Payment Method for Shop Pay Subscriptions
- Unfreezing Subscriptions in Ongoing
- How to View Declined Payments in Ongoing
- Set Up VAT Invoicing For Shopify Subscriptions - Ongoing Subscriptions
- Unpausing a Subscription for a Customer
- How to Add an Anchored Billing Date to an Individual Subscriber
- How to Edit Anchored Billing Date for New & Existing Subscribers
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