Automatic collection

Invoicing Plus

Stripe provides a number of automated recovery features to help collect payments that ​​may have otherwise been unsuccessful—including automatically updating your users’ saved cards, sending emails when a failed payment occurs, and retrying cards at strategic times.

Payment retries

When a payment fails, Stripe retries collecting it according to the rules defined under Manage failed payments in your Subscriptions and emails settings. Stripe doesn’t retry collecting payment:

• If the connected account is no longer attached (Connect only).
• If you can’t use the payment method.
• If you’re using bank debit methods.

Retry schedule

Using machine learning, Smart Retries chooses optimal times to retry failed payment attempts to increase the chance of successfully paying an invoice. The machine learning system behind Smart Retries uses hundreds of time-dependent, dynamic signals, such as:

• The number of different devices that have presented a given payment method in the last N hours.
• The optimal time to pay (payments made for debit cards in certain countries might be slightly more successful at 12:01 AM in local time zones).

Based on a combination of these factors, Stripe intelligently assesses when to retry payments. We continuously learn from new purchaser behaviors and transactions, which provide for a more optimized approach over traditional rules-based payment retry logic. Any invoice with the auto_advance attribute set to true goes through the Smart Retries flow (if enabled), regardless of the selected payment method.

The Smart Retries feature attempts to retry the customer’s charge up to eight times within a customizable time frame and supports cards. You can override this behavior by disabling Smart Retries and defining your own custom retry rules. When you enable dunning, the next_payment_attempt attribute on the invoice.payment_failed webhook indicates when Stripe attempts the next collection.

Customer emails

You can send emails to customers to choose how they update their payment method and send reminders if an invoice hasn’t been paid in your Subscriptions and emails settings.

Choose Link to a Stripe-hosted page Beta or Use your own custom link if you want to provide your own page for customers to update their payment methods.

You can customize the color, icon, and logo that appear on the customer emails and the Stripe-hosted page to incorporate the design and brand of your business.

Send emails to customers to manage failed payments

You can send an automated email to your customers when a card payment on an invoice fails with the Send emails to customers to update failed card payment methods option. Stripe only sends the emails when the due invoice is set to collect payment automatically and has a card payment method. The automated email includes a link that the customer uses to update their payment method.

You can preview the email by clicking the preview icon next to the Send emails to customers to update failed card payment methods option.

To give customers an effective call to action, fill in the link for customers to update their payment information field. You can add your link and preview these emails by clicking the preview icon next to the setting. Or, you can Link to a Stripe-hosted page to collect payments instead.

Link to a Stripe-hosted page Beta

With the Link to a Stripe-hosted page option, Stripe provides a secure, private URL to a Stripe-hosted page in the email. On that page, you can securely collect payments from your customers without writing additional implementation code.

Updating your payment method in the Stripe-hosted page

If a payment failure occurs on a one-off invoice, Stripe sends a link to the Hosted Invoice Page to the customer.

If a payment fails for a subscription invoice, your customers can use the Stripe-hosted page to:

• View the details and amounts for the failed invoice and the associated subscription.
• Add a new card payment method for their subscription for the payment that’s due and for future subscription payments.
• Pay the failed invoice using the updated payment method. When the payment succeeds, the subscription goes back to an active status.

Customers can update their payment method, but can’t pay their subscription invoice if:

• The invoice isn’t in a payable status.
• The failed invoice isn’t the subscription’s latest invoice.
• The invoice has no more automatic retries scheduled.

The Stripe-hosted page expires 30 days after creation. You can customize your retry schedule to perform retries over those 30 days to best accommodate successful payment recovery after a customer updates their payment methods.

Use your own custom link

With the Use your own custom link option, you can provide your own custom link for customers to update their payment information. This link appears within the failed payment email.

Send email reminders

If you’re an Invoicing Plus user, you can turn automatic reminders on or off with Send reminders if a one-off invoice hasn’t been paid from your Subscriptions and emails settings. When on, select whether you want Stripe to send the reminder before, when, or after the invoice is due. There’s a set of predefined options to choose from.

Update the invoice status

You can configure what happens to an invoice after:

• All 3D Secure reminder attempts have been exhausted.
• ​When the invoice ages past a maximum number of days after its due date.

Under Manage invoices sent to customers, enable the Email finalized invoices to customers and Automatically reconcile partial payments that meet a minimum options.

3D Secure payments

You can manage payments that require 3D secure by going to Manage payments that require 3D Secure in the Subscriptions and emails settings.

3D Secure emails

When you enable the Send a Stripe-hosted link for cardholders to authenticate when required option, Stripe sends your customers emails if their card on file requires them to complete 3D Secure authentication. This only applies when the payment attempt occurs and the customer isn’t present (payments made after the first billing period). ​​The email links to a Stripe-hosted page where they can confirm the payment.

3D Secure (3DS) provides a layer of protection against fraudulent payments and most card issuers support it. The Strong Customer Authentication (SCA) regulation in Europe requires 3DS authentication for card payments. Unlike regular card payments, 3DS requires cardholders to complete an additional verification step with the issuer. Typically, this involves showing the customer an authentication page on their bank’s website, where they’re prompted to enter a password or a verification code. This process is familiar to customers through the card networks’ brand names, such as Visa Secure and Mastercard Identity Check.

To send reminder emails—along with a schedule of your choosing—enable the Send reminders if 3D Secure isn’t completed… option. When you enable this option, Stripe notifies your customer of an incomplete 3D Secure payment, prompting them to confirm their payment on a Stripe-hosted page.

Accept partially paid invoices

When you enable the Automatically reconcile partial payments that meet a minimum option, you can instruct Stripe to mark an invoice as paid if ​​it’s partially paid within the set amount. For example, if the payment received from your customer is within 20 USD or less of the total (or at whatever amount you configure), then this setting applies a credit to the invoice for the outstanding amount. It then marks the invoice as paid.

Smarter saved cards

Saved card details can continue to work even if the customer’s issuing bank has replaced the physical card. Stripe works with card networks and automatically attempts to update saved card details whenever a customer receives a new card. Most US-issued American Express, Visa, Mastercard, and Discover cards support automatic card updates. International support for automatic card updates, however, can vary from country to country. Stripe can’t identify what cards can be automatically updated.