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What happens when a customer's subscription payment fails?
The charge is attempted up to three more times, and the subscription is cancelled automatically if none of them succeed. On card payments the retry schedule is set in your own Stripe account, not by systeme.io.
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, such as 3 days then 5 then 7, that is a custom retry policy you configure inside the Stripe dashboard, under Settings, then Subscriptions and emails.
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
| Gateway | What happens after a failure |
|---|---|
| Mollie | No automatic retries. The customer has to retry by hand |
| Mercado Pago | 3 retries. Cards use a fixed interval, Boleto and Pix are spaced 7 days apart |
| Razorpay | 3 retries, 1 day apart. The seller can trigger one early from the Razorpay dashboard |
| Flutterwave | 3 retries, 30 minutes apart. Not changeable |
| GoCardless | 3 retries. The delay depends on the customer's bank, and your GoCardless settings are applied |
| Xendit | 3 retries, 7 days apart. Not editable |
| Secure and Pay | No retries. The customer is notified, and the subscription is cancelled after 30 days with no payment |
| Paystack | No automatic retries |
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.
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.
Ending it yourself
You do not have to wait for the retries to run out. Under Sales, then Subscriptions, filter by the subscriber's email, click the three dots and cancel.
There are two ways to do it. Unsubscribe when the subscription period ends stops access on the date the next payment was due. Cancel now stops it the same day.
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.
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