What happens when a customer's subscription payment fails?

What the system does

A failed charge is not the end of the subscription. systeme.io attempts up to three more times after the first failure, so four attempts in total.

If none of them is collected, the subscription is cancelled automatically. That applies to a subscription and to a payment plan alike.

Who sets the timing

This is the part that surprises sellers. For card payments through Stripe, systeme.io does not control the retry schedule at all. The attempts follow whatever your own Stripe account is set to.

Stripe's Smart Retries picks the timing for you. If you want a fixed pattern instead, that is a custom retry policy you configure inside the Stripe dashboard, under Settings, then Subscriptions and emails.

systeme.io publishes one worked schedule, and it is the one used on its own plan subscriptions: first retry 3 days after the failure, second 5 days after that, third 7 days after that. Four attempts spread over 15 days. That is the shape of a fixed pattern, not a default your account inherits.

For PayPal, the retries are run by PayPal and the whole process is capped at five days. The attempts can land only hours apart, the intervals follow PayPal's internal rules, and systeme.io cannot change them.

Every other gateway

The manual retry on Razorpay skips the wait rather than adding an attempt. systeme.io states plainly that it does not increase the total number of attempts allowed.

What you can do while the retries run

For a customer paying by card, send them a link that lets them replace it. Go to Sales, then Transactions, filter by their email address and open their record. Scroll to the Subscriptions section, click the three dots, and pick Change credit card details. Copy the URL of the page that opens and send that to the customer.

Type the address into the search field and press Filter first, then click the email address in the results. The URL is copied from the address bar of the update page, so it is a link you paste into an email rather than something systeme.io sends for you.

systeme.io's documentation does not say whether a charge that already failed is retried automatically once the new card is saved. Treat the update as fixing what the next attempt uses, not as something that settles a charge already pending.

PayPal has no equivalent. A customer paying through PayPal cannot change the payment method on an existing subscription, so they have to cancel and start a new one with the new details.

That is a new subscription, not a continuation of the old one. Whether its billing date resets to the day they resubscribed, or keeps the anniversary of the original signup, is not something systeme.io states either way.

Ending it yourself

You do not have to wait for the retries to run out. Under Sales, then Subscriptions, type the subscriber's email into the search field, press Filter, click the three dots next to the subscription and choose Cancel subscription.

There are two ways to do it, and systeme.io's own worked example is the clearest way to see the difference. A customer subscribed on 1 January, cancelled by you on 15 January:

• Unsubscribe when the subscription period ends leaves access running until 1 February, the date the next payment was due.
• Cancel now ends access on 15 January, the same day.

The dates and times on that screen follow the format and timezone set in your main account settings, not the customer's.

What the documentation does not say

systeme.io's article on failed payments sets out the attempts, the intervals for every gateway and the cancellation at the end. It does not say whether the seller is alerted when a charge fails.

So the reliable place to look is the Transactions and Subscriptions lists under Sales, rather than an inbox.