Customers are automatically billed for their subscriptions. It can work in one of two ways:
- If customers just purchased a subscription and the first payment must be taken
- If customers have had an active subscription and are getting billed for a new billing period
If customers just purchased a subscription and the first payment must be taken
If it's the first time a customer is getting billed, we will attempt to charge their default card for the first billing period.
If the payment is incomplete, they have up to 24 hours to get in touch with you to update their card on file. Otherwise, the subscription will never become active or available to make bookings.
The simplest solution if this happens is for customers to purchase a new subscription with a card that works or has sufficient funds.
Whether a customer is purchasing now or has scheduled a subscription to start in the future, new subscriptions will always follow the above 24 hour rule. Another way to think about this is that if a customer tried to purchase a bundle and their card was rejected, they wouldn't get it and would just need to try again.
If customers have had an active subscription and are getting billed for a new billing period
For any successive billing period, CodexFit will try to charge customers at the retry interval you have specified in your Stripe account.
You can adjust this here: https://dashboard.stripe.com/settings/billing/automatic
We recommend trying 1 day after the previous attempt for up to 3 days and then to cancel the subscription.
You can opt to also have Stripe automatically send emails to customers during this time, too.
If you use the above recommendation, what will happen is that on the day a customer is due to be billed, Stripe will attempt the charge.
If it fails (i.e. due to insufficient funds), then the customer will be emailed automatically by CodexFit with the error code from Stripe and with a request to check their card.
Then Stripe will retry automatically following your aforementioned schedule. It will carry on retrying until successful or until it reaches the end of your retry rules and then can mark the subscription as cancelled.
During the retry period, the subscription in CodexFit will show as "past due" and the customer will not be able to make any new bookings during that time.