Stripe Smart Retries: FAQs and Best Practices

Stripe uses machine learning based on billions of data points to determine the best time and day to retry a payment, increasing the chance of success. You can set it up

Stripe Smart Retries give you a strong ML-powered first pass at failed payments. Layering Churnkey's Precision Retries on top captures the additional revenue that might otherwise slip through.

Why Layer on Churnkey?

Churnkey’s Precision Retries offer an in-depth, data-based approach to retries.

It is complementary to Stripe's Smart Retries and by using both solutions, companies often see an additional +20% lift in recovered revenue.

Recommended Stripe Smart Retries Setting

We recommend running 4 retries from Stripe Smart retries and then turning on Churnkey retries.

You do all of this within (ideally) a 30 day window and spreading those eight retries out across Stripe Smart Retries and Churnkey.

Tracking Stripe Smart Retries Performance

You will be able to track revenue recovered by Churnkey and Stripe Smart Retries in your Churnkey dashboard.

Churnkey's Precision retries are called 'Retries' and Stripe falls under 'Other' in the dashboard.

Performance Metrics

In 2024, Churnkey protected over $3 billion dollars in subscription revenue across 15 million subscriptions. 

70% of all involuntary churn we detected was recovered. This is one of the highest recovery rates in the industry, and the data is publicly available in our State of Retention Report.

Involuntary churn can be recovered via customer intervention (dunning, feature blocking..) and silently via retries.

Across all our data, precision retries made up the majority of the recoveries. It goes to show how powerful silent recovery can be.

Even a seemingly low monthly churn of 5% results in losing nearly half (45.96%) of customers annually. Precision retries help you keep your churn rate low.

Granular Data Not Available in Stripe

Churnkey's dashboard tracks both high-level metrics like total payments in recovery and granular details that go beyond what's available in Stripe. You can answer questions like:

• which cards fail more?
• why are payments declined?
• how issues like "Do Not Honor" shift over time as we test new strategies?

Hard vs Soft Decline Strategies

Payments fail due to soft and hard declines.

• Soft decline would be something like insufficient funds. You could retry that card and maybe the funds will be there for you to recover. That's when Stripe Smart Retries and Churnkey Precision Retries are really effective.
• Hard declines are the opposite. Those are like the card doesn't exist, it's been canceled. You can retry that card as often as you want but it's never going to update. This is when the dunning communication campaign with emails and text is so effective. You want a hosted payment page for a one-click card update and in-app payment walls. All of which are available in Churnkey.

Warning: Retry Limits

As you set up your Stripe Smart retries logic, be aware of retry limits. Mastercard allows 35 attempts and Visa 15 within a rolling 30 day period. Exceeding these limits can lead to fines as high as $15,000.

The Rest of the Solution is Churnkey

Retries are a part of a solution. To significantly reduce churn, layer on high converting dunning campaigns and in-app product walls.

On average, customers that use Churnkey's retention suite save 20-40% of the revenue that they would have otherwise lost to churn.

To get started, sign up or book a demo.

FAQs

How does Stripe decide when to retry a failed payment?
Stripe uses a machine learning model trained on billions of transactions to choose retry times based on card issuer behavior and global patterns. Churnkey fills the gaps that Stripe misses, and when combined you can see a 20% uplift in recovery on average.

How many times will Stripe retry a failed charge?
Stripe can retry up to 8 times within a 2 month period, unless configured otherwise.

Can I customize the retry logic or frequency?
Yes, you can decide how many retries and how long for do you want to keep retrying.

Where can I enable or disable Smart Retries in Stripe?
Navigate to this page: https://dashboard.stripe.com/revenue-recovery/retries to enable/disable Smart Retries.

Can I manually override Smart Retry attempts with my own logic?
Yes you can do so. Switch to the 'Use custom retry policy'. You can set when to retry but you cannot retry more than 3 times.

How does Smart Retries interact with my dunning emails or lifecycle automations?
You can send a 'charge failed' event to your lifecycle marketing tools and configure your flow there. Or, you can use Churnkey’s purpose-built dunning email and SMS system, which effortlessly outperforms most lifecycle marketing tools without the engineering lift.

What happens after all retry attempts fail?
You should set up an in-app payment wall and card updater to restrict access. Especially useful if the buyer and the user are different users. You can set one up with Churnkey for maximum recovery.

How effective are Smart Retries in recovering failed payments?
They are effective.

In one year, on-demand delivery service Deliveroo recovered more than £100 million using Smart Retries in coordination with other Stripe revenue recovery tools (card account updater and Adaptive Acceptance). Or, to take another example, last year Retool—a development platform for building customer software—recovered more than $600,000 in revenue with Smart Retries.

But here's where it gets even more compelling: when enterprise customers compare Stripe on its own to Stripe plus Churnkey, they routinely see an additional 20% lift in recovery.

Smart Retries is a solid foundation but pairing it with Churnkey creates the most powerful revenue recovery stack available.

Do Smart Retries affect churn rate?
Stripe Smart Retries help reduce involuntary churn. But they don't handle voluntary churn or hard declines. When paired with Churnkey, businesses can cut both involuntary and voluntary churn by up to 54% through personalized cancel flows and precision retries.

Is there a way to measure recovery success from retries?
Yes, you can measure them in Stripe's dashboard or in Churnkey's dashboard.

Will customers be notified when a retry happens?
No. Soft declines are retried silently without requiring customer intervention. Although, you can enable in-app pause walls to block feature access and alert users sooner.

Can I customize messages sent after each failed retry attempt?
Not with Stripe alone. You can do this with Churnkey?

Does Smart Retry work with all payment methods (e.g., cards, wallets, bank debits)?
Yes, all of them should work. ACH is the only exception.

What happens if a card is expired or cancelled?
This would be termed as a hard decline and you should not retry. Instead, you want to use a dunning and a pause wall system using a system like Churnkey.

Is there a risk of triggering fraud rules or card blocks with too many retries?
Yes! Mastercard allows up to 35 attempts and Visa 15 within 30 days. Exceeding these limits can lead to fines as high as $15,000. These limits change yearly.